Anyone know if these tranny's are any good? Bought a brand new rebuild one for $200. Paper work show's $1795. Thanks Dave
That would depend on how well the transmission was built and what your intended application is. A 200 4R transmission can certainly be built to handle most extreme duty applications as well as quite a few horsepower. If your paperwork you mentioned has descriptions of what parts were installed, you can easily determine at least if any of the normal upgrades for better performance and durability were purchased and hopefully installed. The 200 4R was a much, much better transmission with overdrive and a real nice set of gear ratios, whereas the regular 200 or turbo 200 as some people like to call them, was a total piece of crap and should be recycled immediately if spotted lurking in the wild. Bear in mind though, that weaknesses do exist and the remedies to cure them are available. I have a 4X4 suzuki samurai that I am stuffing a 4.3L vortec v6 and a 200 4R into because it is the shortest overdrive auto that GM makes and it fits. (I am 6'6" and work as a professional, award winning hot rod builder and I get teased relentlessly over my samurai and yes I do have hot rods as well, so don't start), Lets just say that I am speaking as someone who is putting his own money where his mouth is.
I used one behind a stock 350 in a '48 Chevy sedan delivery. Nice transmition. Shifted good and with 3.40 gears I was getting 20mpg on the highway. Jeff
GM put em behind 3.8 turbos in the GN's and T-Types in the 80's. most of those cars were hammered on and they held up well. i think they're better than a 700R4
I've junked whole cars with 200R4's for less than $600, if someone would give me $600 each for them I'd go pull them out of the You-Pull-It by the dozens. A 200R4 built stock will handle normal driving and some mild abuse fine. If you plan to abuse it much, add an extra cooler. When I was a teenager I killed one that had 60,000 miles on it, over the next 40,000, towing crap with the car it was in. It was mostly heat issues. Trans shop my folks took the car to did a shitty job, I drove it the first night back and it was leaking like mad and slipping, they "fixed" it, 20,000 miles later it blew again and went to a different garage and they couldn't even use the core, they said it looked like it came from a car that had been burned. By then I wasn't abusing the car so much any more, so I'm not sure if it was the crappy rebuild or they slipped us a shit core. $1795 sounds like a fairly expensive trans rebuild, unless it was done by a local shop, it might be worth checking to see if it got any upgrades when it was done. I saved one that might be a reman and might not be, the engine in the car was a GM reman (possibly a warranty replacement), figured to put it in a non-HAMB-friendly car behind a Pontiac 455 to try and squeeze a little more milage out of it. Have never gotten around to it -
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