Not bad as a daily driver on cruise weekends. A little rough for a starting project for restoration with all the rust around the trunk opening. The rest is typical rust in the typical places. But whomever purchases needs to be very careful and check the spring hangers those are where they fail and that's going to be your biggest issue. If those are good, then Goodmark has all your sheet metal.
As far as Hurst t-tops being rare..., not really
The rarest is the American classic which is what I have on mine, and the biggest problem with that is you can no longer get the gaskets and the seals to keep it from leaking. 78 mostly were Hurst Tops, it was after that where they became Fisher t-tops. 1979 was a mix, and most of your 80 and after were Fisher Body. The nice thing about that is there are still roof cuts available but you're going to pay a good price for one. Having a true TA with the actual Pontiac 400 that is a definite plus. If the 400 is factory, then this was an Ohio car. Van Nuys California was the Oldsmobile 403.
This looks like a WS6 package, yet that is still drum brakes in the rear which is also what you see with your master cylinder. That's a disc drum master cylinder. Everything else is fairly fixable and it looks fairly square, has all its glass and the frame doesn't look too bad. You have one area where you have a pinch weld that's splitting but that can be fixed and resealed.
$7000 in 2025? I'm not sure. I would say more around 5,000. If this was 2010-2011 you wouldn't even touch that car 7,000 for a rusty hulk, but the bottom dropped out after 2009 because of the housing crisis. Yet, on the Trans Am they were still way overvalued at that time.
Looking at just the rust abatement, and that's assuming it has a good drive line, $15, 000 to $25,000 depending on what shop you take it too. Right before I left Indiana to come to Arizona after returning from Iraq, I helped a guy do a Toyota Land cruiser and for all the Midwest rust, the total bill on just getting it into primer was something like $18,000.
If you could get it for $5,000 that would be fair and it's something that you can work on even with spending some cash on the rust issue you still be close to being even or maybe positive on return on investment.
Prior to the housing crisis near the end of 2008, and most people don't know this but the key car to have was a 68 Camaro. So there were several shops that were taking 80s Firebirds and Camaros and changing the rear end to where it look like a 68 Camaro even though the title would say 81 firebird then they would put the 68 Camaro front end on the rest of the car would be an 81 firebird as an example.
So you would take a late seventies or early 80s firebird and convert it to a 68 Camaro. On the street it would look like Camaro on the title it would say firebird. One of the biggest shops I was aware of was in Tennessee, the downside of this was that it ate up all your late 70s and early 80s Firebirds and made their numbers low.
When I was at the one Mecum auction in 2009 I saw a whole bunch of Firebirds that were basically mismatched garbage and most of them were not even trans ams and yet they were still going into the twenties. Things have have changed and some of the customers are smarter but this TA I would say five grand at the most.
