Without a good
solid tranny, the most powerful engine in the world is useless. If
you can't get the power to the ground without breaking stuff, then there
isn't a point to building a killer street car. The stock 700R4s in
Thirdgens are pretty good, but if you start putting a lot more power out
than a stock L98, you can run into trouble real fast. So, I
decided to beef mine up a little bit.
I had the Tranny rebuilt in the summer of
1999 at Terry's Transmission in Syracuse, NY. They used all TCI
parts, and wherever possible used high performance replacements. The
reason that I had the work done was that the converter was on it's way
out. It would vibrate and do all kinds of crazy things when it
wasn't supposed to.
I
had them add a performance shift kit, a
Corvette-style servo, and a 2400 rpm stall speed converter. Between
the Vette servo and the shift kit, car shifts pretty hard. I can
easily chirp the tires going from first to second. The converter
makes a HUGE difference when launching the car. I can easily hold
the brakes, and spin her to about 2500 rpm before the tires break
loose. I love it at a stop light because I can rev it up and as soon
as the light turns green, I lift the brake and get on the gas and it takes
off a lot better.
When the time came for me to
change my tranny fluid, I wanted to make sure that next time I did it, I
would be able to use a drain plug instead of just taking the pan off and
letting all of the fluid make a huge mess. So, I had two
options...either I could add a drain plug to my existing pan, or I could
get an aftermarket pan that had a drain plug already built into it.
I decided to get an
aftermarket pan, because mine was getting all scratched up anyways, and
had a few big dents in it. Once I made that decision, I hade one
other decision to make...get a steel pan, a cast aluminum pan, and
whether or not to get a deeper than stock pan. I decided right
away that a deep pan would not work. I drive my car all over the
place, and the roads here in Syracuse aren't the best, so there are a
lot of bumps and pot holes that could present a problem with a deeper
pan as far as ground clearance goes. Aluminum pans usually ONLY
come deep, so that took them out of the running as well. Also, one
of the properties of cast aluminum is that it is pretty brittle...it
does not bend like steel does. So, if I was to get a deep pan, and
it was to hit something...it wouldn't dent...it would just break off.
That means goodbye transmission fluid, and probably goodbye
transmission.
So, after looking all over
the place, I finally found the one that I went with. It is a TCI
pan, and it is chrome, and has a drain plug built right into the rear of
the pan.
At the same time I changed
the pan, I also added a tranny temperature gauge. The sender had
to go in the pan (well, it didn't HAVE to, but it is most accurate in
the pan), so before I installed the pan, I put the sending unit for the
gauge in it. You can see that in the pics below. For more
info on the sending unit install, check out the "gauges"
section of this site.
This is a pic of the
new tranny pan (obviously) before I installed it. You can see
the 1/2" hole I drilled so I can mount the sender for a tranny
temperature gauge. I made sure that the sender got placed in
the right spot so that it didn't interfere with anything inside the
transmission. That would be bad.
This is what I used
to install the sender. The sender came as just a 1/8" pipe
thread, which wouldn't just screw into anything...so I had to put
something there for it to screw into. This is the B&M drain
plug kit. Luckily, the threads on the plug itself matched up
with the temperature sender. So, I installed the drain plug, and
instead of using the actual plug, I screwed in the sender.
Here is the tranny
pan installed. You can see the drain plug on the left side of
the picture (towards the back of the pan), and the "other" drain
plug/temperature sender sticking out of the side of the pan towards
the right side of the pic (on the passenger's side towards the front
of the pan).
Not sure exactly sure
how much the tranny cooler helped out the tranny because I don't have a
tranny temperature gauge. But, it is a very high quality piece of
equipment, and was easy to install. I am sure that it does work
well, but I basically got it just so I could have a little insurance
against cooking anything.
Basically what it
does is put an additional "radiator" for your tranny fluid to
go through. A stock setup puts the tranny fluid flowing
"through" the radiator. With the tranny cooler, it takes
the fluid, and sends it through the radiator, then out of the radiator
and into the cooler, then back to the tranny.
This shot is from
under the front driver's side of the car, looking back towards the
radiator.
This is looking
from the front of the car towards the back, straight up towards the
radiator.
This shows the new
hose fittings and hose that runs to the tranny cooler.
