A little solidarity goes a long way when you enter a thread. Just sayin.
The labour is what it is. If I provide the parts myself I can save on the total cost so why would I
1) have them order the parts for me and
2) order ALL the parts when some of the used ones are just fine for my needs?
If I can get the job done for 2k instead of 2500 that's significant enough to warrant doing my homework up front and giving the mechanic the parts up front.
Half the gears in the transmission are going to be just fine because they never get abused so I don't see why I should pay for a full rebuild kit. The shift solenoids all work so why replace those? You see why I'm trying to come up with a bill of materials for this job? I can buy a kit and ask the mechanic to just use all of it sure, but he'll be throwing perfectly good parts in the trash and I'll never notice that they were replaced. Considering the fact that the only reason I'm doing a rebuild is because of an oil leak, I'm allowed to nickel and dime the stuff I don't need because I wouldn't have upgraded the tranny otherwise. I'm just opportunistic enough to upgrade certain key components that I know are a good ROI.
J57ltr: Already have a tuner. Performing diagnostics and changing settings won't be a problem fortunately.
As for the superfluous "efficiency" thing, it's not that crazy of an idea even though it does admittedly sound retarded to anyone listening. Efficiency is nothing more than OUT / IN. If you get more OUT for a given IN, it's more efficient but that's also the exact same thing as adding power through any other mod. Want to add a CAI to your car? Gain of +10HP... or you can just make your exhaust tract more EFFICIENT by eliminating the U-bend, thus raising volumetric efficiency and increasing the power you get out of the car for what you put in. It's all equivalent so asking for a more efficient tranny build is tantamount to asking for a power upgrade, since more torque is coupled to the wheels instead of ending up as waste heat.
