Main worry is what engines are viable for a swap here. The 3800SC, which seems the most straight forward, least complicated and most reliable swap was never used on any European cars as far as I know. So probably hard to get hold of here.
From a maintenance perspective .... I take a price in dollars... Double it and replace the dollar sign with a pound sign and thats about the cost.
I have been looking for an air dam for about 10years but the hassle of getting one from US due to size and unavailability here mean I'm still looking. :-)
Would love the luxury of going to a scrapyard to find bits.
I can imagine body parts are impossible to find unless you import from the U.S.
But all mechanical parts must be imported as well?
It uses a lot of off the shelf GM parts. U.S. cars are quite poplar across Europe. For example there are shops which stock Corvette, Camaro and Mustang parts. It's easier to find 60's and 70's Mustang parts than it is some Capri parts for example. And since the classic U.S. cars scene in general is quite developed, with frequent meetings during summer, I thought maybe mechanical parts wouldn't be a hassle?
Is yours swapped?
By the way, how do UK people look at the Fiero? I guess Jeremy Clarkson would make fun of it. But I guess the general public probably doesn't even know what it is? What do they figure it is?
[This message has been edited by Rn2016 (edited 11-22-2017).]
From a maintenance perspective .... I take a price in dollars... Double it and replace the dollar sign with a pound sign and thats about the cost.
I have been looking for an air dam for about 10years but the hassle of getting one from US due to size and unavailability here mean I'm still looking. :-)
Would love the luxury of going to a scrapyard to find bits.
If you are speaking about the soft/rubber portion of the air dam, they can be shipped rolled up and were available from the Fiero Store a couple of months ago. I used their air dam to replace a factory original one that had a 12" tear in it. Price was fairly reasonable also IIRC.
From a maintenance perspective .... I take a price in dollars... Double it and replace the dollar sign with a pound sign and thats about the cost.
I have been looking for an air dam for about 10years but the hassle of getting one from US due to size and unavailability here mean I'm still looking. :-)
Would love the luxury of going to a scrapyard to find bits.
AHH, been trying to remember who wanted that! parcel2go now have a long parcel option, very reasonable too, will get a quote. No use to me.
I must say I didn't expect parts to be such an issue. Sure, body parts is to be expected. I would think even in the U.S. some body parts are not easy to find. Such as a fastback rear end, as I think many notchback owners search for it to make their cars a fastback.
But I thought other parts would be easier to find as they are all from the GM parts bin. So I thought GM European products such as Opel and Saab would share many of them.
Because if parts are hard to find and are expensive to import, unless you really, really love the Fiero and want to be different, is there really that much more incentive to go for a Fiero instead of a local European sports car? The main attraction of the Fiero is the mid-rear engine sports car for peanuts factor. If that doesn't translate in some way to owning one in Europe, then... Or is it still less complicated, easier and cheaper to run than going for an European sports car?
And I would still be interested in knowing what engines and gearboxes available in Europe are good candidates for a swap. I thought about the Opel V6 that came in the Omegas and Vectras. But that is just about as hard to build power as the stock Fiero V6, even if it is 200hp stock. 300HP would be nice. Don't need more. Or maybe one of the GM High Feature that came in the Saabs. Don't know.
So would be really good to hear what swaps have bee done in Europe.
By the way, I've been doing some research and I found out the manual cars have a Getrag box. This is good news as several European cars come with Getrags. So that not only would open hopes of an easier transplant of an European engine but also help with what concerns parts for servicing the getrag box. I guess if I can manage to get an European engine in there with the getrag, the main source of trouble that would need importing parts would be the suspension. The 87 and 88 cars have fully proprietary suspensions, right?
Apart from body parts of course. But is all the Fiero body 100% proprietary? Doesn't it even use a windshield or other glass from some other car or something? Or maybe turn signals or some other external part which is shared?
