So heres the quick story... i work in a IMPORT salvage yard and along came a 97 Camaro with a 3.8 in it. It came with no real reason for its arrival. When I looked in it I noticed a few ported and almost finished being polished performance parts just sitting there. I also found a kind of milky combo when checking the oil! No the block was not affected nor any other part by the blown head gasket. Now knowing this car was off the radar of the import heads working here I quickly put my name on the window and sat on it for a while. The boss was resigning and thought as a going away gift he would foot the bill and suprise me by having the "import" mechanic put the performance parts on as well as new head gaskets , clean it up and fix it for me. Here comes the good part....the mechanic came up with all kinds of excuses about taking forever, like the 30th anniversary deffinitely did NOT come with aluminum parts of any kind and that he would do his best. Well he ended up not tightening anything down to proper specs and one of the lifters started chattering....well he bent a valve so I pulled favors and got a whole nother top half for him. I finaly get it registered in my name title and all for about an hour...first time out it throws a rod....f@#$ s@%$ damn!

Now I am left with this decision....a 3.4 firebird engine and manual trans (i really want a standard!) straight out of a 94 firebird sitting on the yard or a personally built carborated 350 still looking for the MT but have a auto that will work for now.

My question is which would you do and is there any way to make the 2 work together?

 

go with the 350, you'll see much more of a performance gain and the auto isn't as bad as you think, trust me

 

350 with an auto is the way to go.