TKO Upgrade

[blykins]

Ed,

I appreciate all your input that you provide on Club Cobra and I usually take time to read your posts and digest your information.

However, in this one instance, I'm going to have to strongly disagree with the information you have provided.

Just in case I was out in left field, I emailed my Tremec supplier, since he is a dealer and is a Tremec-authorized repair facility, and asked him how many instances he has seen where the 3rd gear has eaten itself away or the cluster shaft gear has been eaten away because of misalignment.

His reply is that it's a new one to him, and if that were the case, he would be seeing a lot of irregular gear patterns, 3rd gear bearing cage damage, or just warranty repairs in general to fix the issue.

As I mentioned before, I've never heard of this, and I sell quite a few TKO's, as well as put them behind a lot of hipo engines that I provide. Some of them go behind road race engines, some go behind drag race engines, and some go behind 650-700 hp street engines.

Now, with that being said, the TKO's don't have a reputation of being the best shifters, especially at higher rpms. This gets better as the trans wears in, but we often do upgrades to correct gear cone and synchronizer hub surface finish, as well as upgrading the shift finger, blocking rings, etc. That usually takes care of the shifting issue, all the way up to 7500 rpm.

The TKO 600 is rated for 600 lb-ft of continuous torque on a trans dyno. If I'm not mistaken, this is rated in all gears except for overdrive. I can recheck this.

The Magnum T-56 is not (IMO) the solution to everyone's needs. In addition to the extra requirements to fit them behind some engine combinations, they are much more expensive, about 4" longer in length past the bellhousing, and much bigger around. This proves to be a big issue in some transmission tunnels, and in the case of a Cobra replica, with an already short driveshaft, shaving another 4" off the body length doesn't leave much.

The one failure from 8 years ago, that you have talked about and showed pictures of, seems to have been an isolated case. I just don't agree with making a blanket statement that says that all TKO's are timebombs, or that each prospective buyer needs to sit down and let this weigh heavily on their mind.

In my own mind, it's a non-issue.