It was a rough summer in 2006 when my transmission started slipping. It happened all at once as I was leaving the school parking lot at lunch on a friday. I got in the car and started driving home but I noticed that I could rev the piss out of the car and it would barely accelerate. Obviously this was a bad thing and I took the good old minivan back to school.

The tranny was fried. It was a stock TH350 and I’m suprised it lasted as long as it did. I started hunting for a fix and a few weeks later my brother pointed out a “high performance transmission” in the bargain hunter(free, parts, cars, etc flyer). I was a little shocked and dissappointed after looking at the ad. It was a stage 3 turbo 350 that had recently been rebuilt and thrown into storage. I was told by a few people that you never want anything higher then a stage 2 in a street car. I decided to phone the guy anyway and ended up buying it. Total cost was around $300. It was a pretty good deal.

Since I had a transmission now and only needed to put it in I suckered my parents into letting me have the garage for the winter. Our garage is insulated but it isn’t heated so if you want to work out there you have to flip the heater on and if your lucky you’ll get an afternoon of working in a zero degree garage. It could be worse but its still far from comfortable.

I took the car out for a spin the following spring and was a little suprised. If you look at the picture above you’ll notice a circular chunk of the case pushing out to the left of the oil dipstick input. That was missing a lock ring and on the second test drive it blew out. Transmission fluid went everywhere and I was going about 30 mph when this happened. Luckily I was on an empty street close to my house but even then I did a good job of painting a good 40 metre stretch with nice clean transmission fluid.