| Well it's like this, when things don't
work out like you planed, you have to plan around them. My original
thought was to use a Turbo 400 transmission with a Gearvendor attached
to it. A Gearvender is an overdrive unit so you can have the engine
running at a lower rpm. Now this is how I ordered the chassis but when I received it, I
didn't like the way the frame was built to go around the Gearvender
unit, so if you remember a few pages back I cut it out and replaced it
with a flat piece. Now the body won't have to have a hole cut in the floor but
this also meant I had to come up with another plan. How about a
transmission that had an overdrive in it?? Yeah....that's it....an
overdrive would be like having the other trans and Gearvendor but
without the added size. After looking into my options for such a
transmission, I had four choices that had an overdrive: 1. 700R4 2. 200R4 3. 4L60E 4. 4L80E.
The first one has a very low first gear which I don't want because the
car is light. The second one is about the same as the first but with a
better low gear that I could live with. The third one is about the same
as the second but has to work with a computer to tell it what to do.
That's what the "E" stands for, "Electronic". After
thinking about how much horsepower I would probably making, and talking
to some of the experts in the field, the first three were to weak and
would surely break. That left me with only one choice if I wanted an
overdrive transmission, the 4L80E. This transmission comes out of a one
ton truck with a diesel engine in it so it can take lots of torque. A
friend of mine told me about a guy that does transmission work and when I
talked to him, he said he would lend me an old empty 4L80E case. This
way I could bolt it to my block and mock it up to see if it cleared the
tunnel in the car because this is larger than the Turbo 400.
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