Thank you. Yes when I went looking for a convertible I was prepared to travel all over Australia to find one. Found this one with the colours I instantly fell in love with only 40 miles from me and it was the cheapest factory V8 for sale at AU$39k.
I chose the AODE because I originally swapped out the C6 for and for a freshly built AOD at a good price. But even after I imported Silverfox's valve body from the US, I was never happy with it. No matter how much I tightened the TV cable, I ended up shifting it manually otherwise it would just do lazy changes into higher gears. Also, when you turned the overdrive off, it slammed back to 3rd which was uncomfortable and I didn't think would be good for the box long term.
AOD's/AODE's and 4r70w have never been fitted to cars here in Australia so you have to find secondhand ones and find someone to rebuild them. Parts are also not easy to find. Secondhand rebuilders go for $700 by the time you pay the freight. I picked this one up from a mate for a good price. I sold the AOD and bought this AODE and a Quickshift 4 from the US and still had change. It seems to be a tough box, we don't know the history of it but it was behind a '95 5 litre turbo fox body that would light the tyres at 50 mph and has firm but not unpleasant shifts.
My new motor is a torque monster. It's only got 70 miles on it so far so I'm being fairly gentle (limiter is set to 5500), but at 50 mph in overdrive, if you punch it to half throttle it kicks back to second and lights the tyres and chirps into 3rd. I had a 'gentle' dyno tune done yesterday to set the timing curve on the ignition box and check my O2 sensor. It's an old school analogue dyno so they couldn't give me a printout but they said as soon as they tried to go over 200 hp the tyres started slipping on the dyno (and I have very good street tyres). Anyhow, they were happy with the tune and said go and put a couple of 1000 kms on it then take it to the guys with a digital dyno near me as their rollers have grip. The dyno operator said the motor wants to rev to 8k! The cam is a Lunati Voodoo Hydraulic Roller Cam 231/239 which is very lumpy at idle.
My next job is suspension work, I can't fit the slapper bars properly as the u-bolts hit the chassis rail so I'm thinking of fitting Caltracs to stop windup.