I decided that since my Sunbird project started forever ago it's not worth doing a journal on, but it might be alright to do one for the spyder I have.
Heres the back story in the late summer of 2014 I was getting ready to give up on my 1980 sunbird, it needed an out of province inspection to be roadworthy and because I had changed the engine and such it seemed like that would not happen, I had thought it was very close but after finding out a new windshield was around 800 dollars was unwilling to take the chance on buying one and having it still not pass and was ready to give up. I had had the car for like 17 years had fooled with it off and on and had never been able to drive it. One night I went out for coffee with some friends and we got talking about it and I told them I was done with it, I was debating pulling the drivetrain and scrapping it, I told them I was thinking of putting my 350 into a fox body or something. About a week later one of then called me, said he knew a mechanic who would look at the car and see what all it needed, and he knew of a place where I could get a good windshield for 150 bucks.
So not long after that me and another friend took a drive to go look at the windshield we ended up at a wrecking yard in a small town about half an hour from where I live where much to my surprise there were 4 h body cars in various stages of repair. The owner of the wrecking yard said he had got all 4 cars from 1 person not long before that. 1 had no rearend and was stripped to a shell.. another had a busted windshield, and was really beat up... another had a perfect windshield, no drivetrain and a very nice interior and the last is the spyder I still have which the owner of the wrecking yard told me would actually run. it has a target master smallblock chevrolet and an automatic trans. The owner and I ended up cutting a deal on the last 2 cars for $ 850 (canadian) he would deliver both of them to my house. I spent the winter gutting the motorless car, put the interior parts I needed and the windshield from it into my sunbird and put the other parts in storage and then sent the shell off to another closer wrecker for crushing. In the spring much to my delight my sunbird did become roadworthy and So instead of having to switch all my parts to the monza which is an in province car I ended up with an extra h body that really I still have no idea what I'm gonna do with. it is an actual spyder according to the vin and I'm sure it would be a nice car if I fixed it up.
When we first got the monza here we put a battery in and threw some fuel down the carb and did get it to start, so in the last few weeks I decided to see if I could actually get it to run for more than a few seconds. So far I've changed the plugs, added an in line electric fuel pump because it wasn't getting fuel to the carb I finished that up today and it wouldn't fire up so I attacked the ignition system. and have now added a new cap, rotor and plugs. it will now fire up but only if I dump fuel in it, there is fuel getting to the carb now though. it seems the more I look at this car the more I realize whomever played with it before had no idea what they were doing... and did a bunch of random stuff that really makes no sense.