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I told Bea I would take her for a ride in it when it was road worthy again. Like I said, she never drove it. It only has 121K miles. It makes me mad to see it neglected like this. When I sold it it was running, driving, clean and the paint was still good! Now look! I am excited to fix it up though. I learned a lot about these cars by working on my '90 convertible and making friends on the forum. Jiggity76 had been a huge help, I cant thank him enough!

Great story, and I could almost picture the events as they happened.. Mods.. I dont know if you can edit the OP post, but with the DARK Theme, you cant even see the writing.

Wow, great story! Seeing the photos brought back some memories. I had an almost identical red '91 CS back in the late '90s, except mine had the luggage rack on the trunk. The 'flash dash' was easily my favorite feature. I hope you can get her put to rights before she deteriorates any further. You should take Bea for a ride in it when you do. I've never recovered a car I previously owned but I did have one follow me to another town after I sold it. A couple of years after I graduated from college, I bought a 1986 Olds Calais Supreme and left my 1977 Buick Skylark (Nova clone) with my dad to sell for me. I was living in a town about three hours away at the time and about a year and a half later, I started seeing this car on the road that looked a whole lot like my old Skylark. One day, I saw it parked on the street and was able to take a closer look at it. Sure enough, it was my old car. I never did see the new owner to talk with them. Probably just as well. Of course, at the other end of the spectrum was the '94 Olds LSS I had after the '91 CS. I sold it to my best friend, whose idea of maintaining a car was to wash and wax it about once a year, whether it needed it or not and I don't think he even knew how to open the hood nor what to do under there if he did. But whenever something went wrong with it mechanically, he would call me up and complain about it as though I'd sold him a lemon. I got to watch that car deteriorate for about six years before he finally donated it to charity.

I've done it both ways. Doing a factory vacuum swap is a gigantic pain, but possible if you want to pull the dashboard apart and most of the engine bay. It also comes with issues of its own. the factory non ABS master is at a different angle to PMIII and comes VERY close to the turbo. I've thought about this and in my junkyard trips it looks like J and N cars of the era used the same master but angled up slightly, that may help the issue of it being close to the Turbo but it may also bring its own set of issues. never done it but its been on the back of my mind. Also you'll need to run 2 new rear brake lines. making absolutely sure to not get them backwards since you'll no longer be running a Front-Rear Split setup but a Cross- diagonal so the Front left needs to be on the same side of the master as right rear and front right needs to be on the same side as left rear. You can't get away with just one as the factory rear brake line is 1/4" or something like that and standard are much smaller. What I did on my Red Turbo GP was remove everything PMIII off the firewall and use a 4th gen F body booster and master. It has the advantage of also being Front rear split so you don't have to mess with the brake lines to the rear of the car and it can be done in a day or 2, not weeks. What I did, and I know others have done it differently I made an adapter plate of aluminum to bolt to the factory bolts then put my own holes in for the F body booster. You DO have to cut holes in your factory firewall plate for this. and in the future i'd do it a bit different and cut most of it away so I could access the booster bolts easily from the inside of the car I did have to cut and extend the pushrod from the booster so it was the same length as PMIII Was. Just cut and welded that. I considered threading the rod and putting a turnbuckle on it to get it proper. Now the fun part is the brake lines. Since we live in america getting metric fittings is a bigger pain then it should be. I changed everything to 1/4 fittings, took the front brake lines and put them into a t fitting, and then made a brake line to go from that to the master. For the rear I also changed the fittings to SAE but then put it into a reducer to get the size of the line down to fit into the master, again just made and extension tube to get it how it needed to be. Not the cleanest part of the install but it does work quite well. If I ever get around to working on TGPs again i'll be doing this same modification to my Black TGP as I fully believe PMIII is not fit for purpose at this point. I'll revisit the modification at that time and fine tune it then.

Some time ago a forum member did this conversion, the usual approach is to remove the PMIII firewall adapter plate & install the regular plate that supports the vacuum booster/master cyl. Can't remember who it was but he didn't remove the adapter plate, instead he drilled it, did some light machine work/welding to it to accept a vacuum booster. If memory serves because he was in Europe he didn't have access to the needed parts so he improvised. The rear brakes lines need to be formed as the ABS system makes use of a single brake line that tees off at the rear wheels whereas the vacuum system makes use of 4 independent lines.

I was going to but never got around to it. I'll have to come back to this thread and describe my lessons learned from converting my car when I have more time. Long story short... and this is just my opinion: The PMIII was a ill-conceived idea in the mid 1980s, and then we add 30 years of living next to a hot turbocharger onto that and its gone from a questionable system to flat out unsafe. It adds in entirely too many faults and fail scenarios that just shouldn't exist. On top of that critical components are just not available anymore. Believe me, I tried like hell to make it reliable. I stopped just short of making my own controller for it namely because the cost of a modern safe pressure switch that I needed completely eclipsed the cost of replacing it wholesale.

The fog lamps furthest toward the middle of the car? Yes, there should be adjustments on them.. however, most of them have broken over time. It has been a very, very long time since I've looked at the 88-90 fog lamp, but if I'm remembering it right, there is a screw that runs straight down from the top and there is a plastic piece that adjusts the tilt up/down. That plastic piece is what breaks. If you can move the fog lamp by hand up/down, then it's broken.

Agreeing with a vacuum leak. There are a LOT of brittle plastic vacuum lines on a 3.1 that fail over time. Check every single line and make sure there are no cracks. Especially check the one that feeds the MAP sensor.

The pump is continuing to run because the relay has failed. It's been a long time since I've dicked around with PM3, but IIRC, those relays are out of production. Likely other shit is beginning to fail too. You can convert to vacuum brakes with some work. If you search around the forum, I believe @White93z34 did a writeup on how to convert.

I research this kinda thing because of my site and because I own a 91 Cutlass - Some of you may already know Ed Welburn headed up design on the 1988 Cutlass Supreme and I assume that influenced the other W's as well. One interesting thing was that he said he designed the Cutlass along with the Olds Aerotech as a side project. Working on the Cutlass by day, Aerotech by night / in free time. Recently I saw another video that was more candid and informal, where he said he would talk about his best design and his 'least favorite' - he was most proud of bringing Camaro back, and probably also the new Corvette, but he couldn't mention that at the time. I had guessed his least fave was the Cutlass. Not that he didn't LIKE the design of the exterior, he had just said that it was too much for the time. He said Roger Smith wanted them to do a car like a concept GM car that was on display at Epcot called the Aero 2000. He wanted it to be as advanced as that car. Ed said it was like what you'd call a Jelly Bean car design of the time, he said it was too much. He said they tested it on people and nobody liked it, so they tested it on more people hoping they would like it. He said they probably tested the look of the car on everyone in America because they wanted to hit on a group who actually DID like it. He said the interior was the opposite to the exterior and it didn't go far enough. Also he said it didn't look great once it came to market with smaller wheels than the "pie's" and not in 2 tone like the Indy 500 black/silver cars. So I thought all that was interesting and didn't know if that is common knowledge over here. When you look at the window / greenhouse of that Epcot car, the Aero 2000, I can see some similarities. I can see why people were reluctant to like the "new" Cutlass, coming from the G-Bodies, with rear wheel drive and that squared off look that was so popular the continued it in 1988 as a Cutlass Supreme "Classic". Ed is a great guy, designed some awesome stuff in his time - I've messaged him on Facebook to ask him about something Aerotech related that was on eBay, got to talking and showed him my convertible, that technically I guess he designed so many years ago!

If it’s still stock (and has the pm3 brakes) it’s basically a matter of time until they’re non functioning, at least safely. You can swap vacuum brakes in with some effort, but I was lucky enough to have bought my TGP with that swap already done when I owned it.

LIM gaskets would be my first guess, or another vacuum leak

I said I was willing to spend $500 dollars, not that I was actually going to pay that much. For clarification, Tire Rack has a set of Blizzak WS80s on clearance for ~$70/ tire, as opposed to the average price of $110 each (for a variety of sizes). Since I live near one of the warehouses, I am able to knock $40 off per set to pick them up. Coupled with a current $80 rebate, I was able to buy them for $181 with tax. I'll post pictures when the snow flies later this year.