Here's a little story and some info about my 2000 Regal.
On Dec 17,2010 and 173K miles the trans started acting up. I drained the fluid and refilled with a quart of Lucas and 4 or so quarts of dex 3. It was quickly jumping 1k rpms and slamming back to where it should have been. That stopped within a hundred miles of doing the fluid. Being me, I kept driving the car and had all the trans parts sitting around waiting to be put together and go into the car. In the spring, cleaning up for the meet.... I took a little time with some of the guys and put together the transmission into one of my old cases from the Bonneville. Built as follows
Reused Intense input shaft
New precision stock converter
fresh clutches in all along with new steels and added some 2nd and 3rd plates to take up extra slack.
Reused hardened 4th hub
Reused valve body from Intense build
2.93 (stock gearing) with new V8 chains
New reluctor (gee...go figure huh?)
During the summer the right axle went bad, so I tossed just that in, delaying the trans swap as I planned to change the rear engine cover gasket while the trans came out. Kept on driving. Sometimes I needed to press and depress the Perfomance button to get the trans to go into converter lockup. This symptom then stopped happening. Saw an input speed sensor reclutor welded to the drive gear. This is the one thing that kept failing on me. It gained my interest, kept me thinking about it.
Now we are about to November and the trans begins acting up with the rpm jump fairly often, causing me to think....it's time. Being me, I keep on driving and driving. Passenger axle is bad (GSP, cheap chinese), I picked up another. A front wheel bearing, right side outer tie rod and that pesky rear engine cover are bad. I pulled the trans out of the threaded cooler line 97 case it was in and put it into a 2000 case with click style lines like my car has, while it was apart the ISS and drive gear got welded together. No more worries from that part ever again. December 29th I drove the car with new transmission in the trunk to Dan's for the swap.
Official mileage at time of swap 193,750 still had 4th gear and was overall running pretty good. Max helped out and we swapped the trans, wheel bearing, rear engine cover, oil, coolant, (tried the oil pan..the engine sealant goop is really strong lol) and when I test drove it..the rpms were jumps a bit and there was clearly something wrong with how it was shifting. By the time I limped home it was apparent that it probably was max adapt shift.
Over the next couple days I tried programming 3.29's (in case I grabbed the wrong gears) and a few other things. I noticed the speedo was off by 5-10mph no matter what I tried for gearing. Changed pulses per mile to determine a 34 tooth reluctor was on the differential. This would have been a leftover from the spoofs Intense put into a car to fool it about having 3.29 gearing. All stock HD diffs come with a 30 tooth count. Tried programming around the issue, talked to one buddy having some TCC issues and he mentioned he had 3.29's and 34tooth as well as having programming that worked for it. I took a try at that, looked it over and no luck. Removed the axle and diff cover, swapped the reluctor, programmed the 2.93 (stock) ratio back in and.... MAGIC. There must be some tables that we can't see that get effected by the reluctor. Having the wrong reluctor and knowing it, trying to program around it was unsuccessful. The correct reluctor is all that was needed.
