I just bought an 83 cutlass 3.8L and went looking for some online info about G-bodies. My plan is to find a smallblock and a 700R4 for it. Mostly I am looking for info on what suspension or brake mods I should look into. I want a street performer, I may take it to the track a few times but I'm not going to gear it for the strip. Any advice on the swap would be greatly appreciated.
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Small block chevy or olds ?
I would use the 200-4r both are good transmission's but it seems the 700r4 gets hyped up a lot. you would need a custom driveshaft for the 700r4 and im not sure about the crossmember. with the 200-4r you could use the crossmember and drive shaft out of any G-body with overdrive (except 442,
H/O and Turbo regal).
for suspension like gbody 5 said
Moog 5660 front and CC627 rear (if you got the extra $ the Eibach pro spring kit is nice) and definately the Bilstein's front and rear (got mine from summit 57.70 each) get all the Chassis stiffening braces THEY WORK!. You can get a front sway bar out of a third gen camaro its a direct bolt in and if you look there are plenty of camaros out there that have the hollow 36mm swaybar in them. Depending on your funds you should check out the SCandC stage 2 suspension Marcus is a great guy and sells very nice stuff, the stage 2 setup corrects a lot of the incorrect suspension geometry found in stock G-body suspensions.
in the rear suspension I use hotchkis lowers edelbrock uppers and the ATR swaybar there may be something better for the rear but i like what i have.
for wheels I would definately go 16" or bigger Im currently using 245/50/16's on all 4 but thinking about going to 17" Torg-Thrust 2's
for brakes there are a lot of options these days.
theres the
B-body swap which I dont know much about other than it requireing aftermarket upper arms and bigger than stock wheels.
theres the 99 and up 2wd blazer swap that is pretty much a direct bolt on (entire spindel) and has a sealed wheel bearing and dual piston caliper. i think stock wheels can be used with it
theres a set up for using C-5 brakes on modified G-body spindels
theres the G-5 kit (SCandC.com) that gives you a aftermarket front suspension with C5 corvette brakes