I heard about setting it up that way on a Buick board.

Yesterday I took it out for a test drive and it appeared my transmission work was in vain as it shifted the same. It seems to be good with the 3.42 gears (speedo might actually be accurate...), but the engine also had a mis-fire. So I needed to trouble shoot that before any more testing could be done.

Made this nifty modification to the top bolts so they are easier to install and remove.
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I was going to start on the disc brake swap, but I'm far less prepared than I thought I was. Missing basic things like brake hoses and caliper pins =P So that is on hold for at least another week while I gather the last few parts.

Working on the car today I fixed the miss-fire as well as made some improvements to the transmission. The miss was simple enough, I put the timing light on each plug wire and they were doing their job, got the laser temp gun out and cylinders 1 through 5 had around 200ºF exhaust manifold temps and number six was at 60ºF. Turned out the injector plug came loose. Soon as I pushed on it the engine smoothed right out. Probably came loose from messing with the TV cable near the firewall.

The transmission, I decided to hook up a pressure gauge to see how the hydraulic pressure of the system was doing as well as what the pressure rise was with throttle. I had measured 1.5" of travel on the throttle valve, but doing some internet reading last night it sounds like the best setups have around 1" of travel, referenced off WOT. So I slid the bracket down the pedal linkage and adjusted the cable accordingly. The pressures however are essentially mediocre. Despite the modifications to the transmission it just meets OE spec's for pressure, BUT in driving it, the shifts are snappy, the transmission downshifts nicely with throttle input, and the upshifts have no hesitation anymore! :thumbs: The speedometer now runs a tad slower than I'm actually going (was way faster), if I put 26" tires back on it, it might be spot on.

The lingering issues, is I would have expected more pressure out of the pump, but it caps out around 175-180psi, which if fine for stock, but I expected more. What really bothers me is going into reverse it doesn't hit into gear as fast and firmly as it had before. The hydraulic pressure is actually decent compared to the book spec, while at the same time pressure in L1 is a tad low which I think might have some shared hydraulic flow paths, which I'm going to look into. I got apparently too aggressive with the 3rd gear shift. It was a bit softer than the 1-2 shift before I had problems, so I upped the hole size and now it's pretty harsh regardless of throttle input. Oh well. With the 3.42 gears its waiting longer than necessary to shift into 3rd gear, and its likely from the modifications I made to the governor to make it shift later with the 4.56 gears. If I drop the pan again, I think I can stick a spring back in the governor and it might fix that. Otherwise, I think I can be happy with it for quite a while.

I'm actually quite surprised how much I am liking the 3.42 gears. I was thinking after the 4.56's that the car would drive like a dog, but its not bad at all. It doesn't quite pick the front end up as responsively as the 4.56 gears did, but it drives quite nice. It is ALSO quite nice not having the spool in the rear anymore! It should be interesting to see if my fuel economy goes up. I was getting right around 20mpg with the 4.56's.