John Wood Transmission
When we first purchased this truck, it had 221,000 original miles on it, all of which had been put on by the original owner, a Goodyear Tire store in Montana. We were lucky enough to find this truck along with all the service records, right down every single oil change invoice. After going through the whole stack of receipts and never seeing anything about a transmission swap, we called up the shop we'd bought it from to confirm that after all those miles the trans had never been replaced.
Sure enough, they informed us that the tranny had never been removed from the truck, just serviced religiously every 30,000 miles.
While that may seem tough to believe, as stock transmissions have never been known for their
strength and reliability, these guys really took care of it. While it still shifted great and seemed to be working fine, it didn't take long after we started adding some horsepower for it to start slipping the converter and blowing past shift points. With the new injectors, turbo, and chip upgrades and 10,000 hard miles, it was time for some upgrades.
We've dealt with John Wood Automotive in the past and have had great success with his parts and service, so naturally he was a first choice when it came time to build a transmission for this truck. Based out of Holtville, CA, John Wood focuses primarily on the Ford 4R100 and E4OD transmissions. Through years of experience and literally thousands of tranny builds, it's safe to say John knows the Ford transmission as good as anyone in the business. Whether building a transmission that can stand up to the abuse of heavy towing under extreme desert heat or the thrashing a transmission can be subjected to at the race or sled pulling tracks, John Wood
Automotive can build to suit and survive.
With plans for this truck consisting of just your average daily driving conditions with a few weekends at the drag strip tossed in there for good measure, we contacted John and talked things over. We told him what we'd added to the truck performance wise, what we'd be doing with the truck and what we expected from the truck. He suggested that due to the trucks light weight and somewhat traction limited situation being 2wd and all, that his basic Stage One transmission would be more than enough to handle the abuse and horsepower we'd subject it to.