and man, does it feel GOOD! (remember that comment, Mac?)
The story goes something like this...
My tranny was upgraded about a year and a half ago with the Art Carr/DR kit including Kevlar bands & clutch plates, hardened stub shaft, tailshaft forced lube, drilled valve body, and Stallion 2800 stall torque converter. I drove with the n/a 300 rwhp setup and drag raced many times over that period of time with no problems. About October I finished the blower install and jumped to 471 rwhp. Raced a couple of times and noticed some tranny "funnies" but didn't worry too much about it. The 2-3 shift would sometimes slip and feel like a missed gear, letting me hit the rev limiter. If I hot-lapped the tranny would get so hot it would go into limp-home mode and short-shift.
Then I went to SSHS5 and ran two days in a row with no additional issues. After that I went on a road trip to Charlotte for lunch with the Carolina Marauders (and alignment by Russell) and on to Raleigh to visit the grandkids. Drove back from there across the mountains to Tennessee. All is well so far. Then driving back to ATL on the following Monday the tranny started to slip. I couldn't tell for sure if it was the tranny or the t/c clutch so I fooled around with the o/d button, manual shifting, switched the chip to the lockup program, stuff like that to try and diagnose the problem... Bad idea, about 40 miles before ATL it quit pulling altogether in 3rd and 4th so I drove the rest of the way in 2nd gear at about 45 mph. That was Monday of the week before Thanksgiving. The tranny lasted about 50k mi overall.
I had a few other repairs to be done while it was in the shop and that along with the Thanksgiving holidays contributed to the car's long residency at the shop. Other fixes included rear end repair for the one-wheel-peel that started at SSHS5 and a throttle cable replacement to try and fix the jerky off-idle acceleration.
Damage report: spiralok snap ring broke (that was the killer and first time the tranny guy has ever heard of one of those letting go), couple of clutches burned a little but nothing terrible, both drums were damaged (one had the teeth damaged by the hardened stub shaft and the other had notches worn into it). Not a lot of pieces in the bottom of the pan, so that's a good sign.
Repair process: sent the t/c back to PI for test/checkout and it was fine, sent the driveshaft back to Dynotech for rebalance. Had the B&M pan painted with thermal disperant coating. Ordered rebuild kit from LenTech along with their 26-spline billet stub shaft and drum (the original is 21-spline). The kit has bands and clutches with more surface area, made of new materials (supposedly better than Kevlar). We left out the wave plate from the drum and added an extra clutch plate (this makes the 4-3 downshift really hard but gives you a lot stronger clutch pack). The rest of the re-assembly was pretty routine except for leaving out accumulator valve springs and drilling out valve body passages even bigger. This should be good for 650 hp or so, according to the tranny guy.
The rear end was pretty much destroyed so rebuild wasn't possible and a replacement OEM differential unit was installed. Next time it'll get a bigtime rebuild with welded tubes, 31 spline axles, ECTED electric locker. This time I had hoped for a quick turnaround and didn't have the prep work done for the major job.
Throttle cable replacement fixed the jerky off-idle throttle response.
Man, it's nice to have the car back. Needs some work on shifting program still since the mods changed firmness of shifts and the pressures are easily adjusted with programming. Gonna go to the tuner in early-mid January for AFR adjustment, fuel trim optimizing, and drivability adjustments.
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Congrats.
