I ran a ta-33 with an orange stripe 2800 stall. The 2800 made a big difference with mine, I think my convertor must have been bad. I couldn't get the spool up to hardly spin the tires. It was my daily driver and ran great. It went high 13's hot air. Anded a spearco intercooler and went high 12's.
Why would the conversion on an 84 be cost prohibitive to convert to the 87 intake? It seems like the parts are available. Such as intake, exhaust manifolds. There's not that much used hot air upgrades out there. New; the turbo would be $800, headers and downpipe $800, Intake work $?. I bought all this stuff new for my 84. Now that I'm rebuilding the 87, I sold all my performance stuff off of the 84 so I could sell it. Now my 16 year old son might want to drive it, so it looks like I might slowly want to push the performance back up. I do have a stock 87 turbo, so was thinking of the 87 intake.