Beretta.net

I initially bought this car to fix it and resell it several years ago, but fell in love with the car right away. It is a bright pull-me-over red, with a light grey interior, original Z-24 with the 2.4 Twin Cam LD9 DOHC engine (successor to the 2.3 Quad-4), original five-speed car with the power sunroof, and manual windows (how I like them).

I paid $120 for this car with a grenaded engine -several holes punched through the block, two rods thrown, one piston completely disintegrated, and the oil-pan perforated like a cheese-grater. The front-end had been used to mow-down the previous owner's mother's mail-box and later her garage door before he exploded the engine 'missing a gear on an off-ramp' -right. Some people shouldn't be allowed to drive... Anyway, the car was filthy, piled full of trash, the stereo had been stolen out of it and the wiper speed-control knob broken off of the stem when the thieves yanked the dash-surround out of the way to steal the stereo. It was a very sad little car that had lived through a very rough several months.

I used the 2.3 SOHC Quad engine from my '92 Grand Am, at this point owned by a friend who wanted to upgrade the 180k+ mile engine with a 3800 after the Quad blew its' head-gasket (again). After replacing two bent valves from the Cavvy's original 2.4 Twin Cam cylinder head, it was fine (despite the ridiculous amount of damage to the rest of the engine), and I was able to adapt it to the 2.3 Quad block. This gave me 4 valves per cylinder, Dual cams, and best of all the upgraded direct-drive power-steering pump (the after-thought PS pump on the older Quads is a bad joke by GM, IMO ). The engine went in fine, and ran great. I loved the car instantly, and it stayed in the family.

About a year later, the oil-pump seized on the 2.3 DOHC hybrid, causing one of the already tired rod bearings to go out for lunch, despite catching the no-oil-pressure almost instantly. The engine now needed a new crank to be up to snuff, so I started looking around. I ended up getting a good deal on a newer, low-mileage LD9 Twin Cam from an '01 GA before I ever found a good crank for the 2.3, and so I dropped that in instead. The newer LD9 has a little higher compression ratio, and ditches the EGR that I love to hate. While it was going in, I decided to add a little IHI turbocharger and intercooler, both sourced from a Ford 2.3 Thunder Coupe T-Bird with low miles. I added an e-bay special Blow Off Valve and a boost-controller, and built a 2.5" full mandrel-bent short-run side-outlet exhaust for the car. Now I had one ripping little Z -this car kept up with my 3800SC GTU, at least up to ~75-80 MPH- for a total investment of around $750, including both engines and the turbo work. A couple of years ago, I was given a pair of steel Z-3 style vent-fenders for the car, so I prepped them and painted them myself with a decent automotive-grade color-match PPG paint and clear-coat -they turned out alright, considering that I had to build my own hot-box spray booth and am NOT a professional painter. I also bolted on a Fiero GT wing spoiler -any bigger and the car would look silly to me. I already had red metallic fader window-tint on the car (it needs to be redone now, most of the red has 'faded' to silver ).

Recently, I have given the car Enkei 16" rims from a Subaru (the inside hub-hole needed to be enlarged a little on the wheels to fit the hubs on the car), re-cleaned the interior (it sat all last winter, even though this is the best snow-car I've ever had), and just finished replacing the exhaust-tips that were lost in a really bad snowy season two years ago. The new ones are okay, but not as nice as the ones I originally made for the car.

Some other mods include Grand Prix GT hood-vents, and a functional off-set hood-scoop (to feed the intercooler). On the inside, the car has a triple-gauge cluster pod in the middle of the dash with boost, oil pressure, and fuel/air ratio gauges, a newer Cavalier dome-light with twin map-lights built-in, red glow-pedals, red shift-boot, red "Engine Start" button, Pioneer stereo, 12-disk Pioneer Premier CD changer, and Pioneer Amp. Mechanically, it also has an older-style external-slave transmission, LUK clutch, IDI coil mod to use conventional GM coils and plug-wires, and a fuel-pressure test-port on the fuel line.

The car is running a little rough lately, and griping about higher boost-levels (above ~5 psi). I may just have a bad tank of gas in it, but I am tentatively planning a wild ECU replacement with much larger injectors and an adjustable ignition timing system, but I'm not certain I like the unit I am looking at for this, especially since it would be relying on a more finicky MAF system for fuel metering... I'll see how the little car runs from now until then. In all likelihood, the mods wouldn't be permanent anyway... I'm pretty sure he also needs a new TPS, and the IAC may need cleaning -that may be all I need to do here.

Here are some pics, some old, some new.

Nice! Bright red Z24's are sharp. Do you have a pic of the car with the Fiero wing on it?

I used to have a 97 Z24 I bought to keep miles off the 2008 Cobalt I had at the time.. I hit a tough spot in early 2010 and had to sell the Z24 unfortunately.. I still miss the car. Mine was a 2.4 Auto but it drove so damn good. Didnt have a thing wrong with it when I sold it. To this day I have never seen another Z24 in this factory blue color..



Props on keeping yours on the road! 120 dollars?? Thats a damn good price on a 5 speed Z24 even if it needed a ton of work.

I like your idea of using high temp paint on the inside of the exhaust tips.. I need to do mine black on the Z26

That was one CLEAN Z... I didn't think the Z-26 rims would look that sharp on a Cavvy, but yeah, that looks great! I worked on a '95 2.3 Quad/auto Z-24 I think was the color of yours, it was a nice looking car, for sure.

Thanks for the props... Here are a couple of shots showing the GT wing. It is also visible in the first pic in the first post too, but doesn't jump out at you -it really isn't as over-sized as it looks in some of the pictures. Here are a couple of other shots too.