I definantly agree with Miniwally, My dad and I talked abou the same thing once when he was interested in a 6 spd Dmax and I had found all kinds of info about the "bad" flywheel and clutch. You take 100 Dmax/6spd owners and 85 of them don't have any problems and have no interest in any forum. 10 out of the remaining 15 DO have problems and let eveyone know about it on the internet, the remaining 5 don't have problems but are interested in their trucks enough to get involved in a website online. So a person comes across one of these sites to get info on a dmax with a 6spd (like my dad and I a few weeks ago) and find that 75% of the manual equipped trucks had problems according to the site on hand when in reality out of all mass produced it was 10%. (made up figues of course) Tim, I don't know what exactly you have seen personally fail but in my time I have never had a Th700R4 failure( supposedly very common to quit), my grandpas "weak and unreliable" E40D in his '95 Powerstroke has 258K on the stock tranny with nothing more than an oil change at 90K, my neighbors "supposedly much better" updated 4R100 in his '02 PS gave out at 80K, our '76 C30's TH400 clutches gave out with relativly low mileage and an easy life, and lastly my dad's '98 C30 with an NV4500 has clutch and/or linkage problems. Maybe this shows why I have faith in different things and don't just believe what I read on the internet about parts that supposedly had LOTS of problems.
Going a little OT, but that comment about the 700R4 made me think. Our "1 ton K5" has a 700R4 in it and it apparently did fine for the p.o. and worked great for us until it "suddently and unexplainably lost all forward gears except low". Worked fine when my son drove it to school. Parked it, and then went to leave that even and it mysteriously "died". That was his story and he vehemently denied that there was anything missing, till the case was opened up. Broken housing, broken planetary drum, and lots of other bits-n-pieces. "AMAZING!" I said to him when he got home that day. "How that stuff just BLEW UP sitting in a parking lot. Then I found out the truth. He had been out with friends who drive Mustangs, TAs and the like and they were doing burnouts. So he decided to show them up with the K5. Apparently it survived a fair few high rpm neutral drops and fully roasted the 35" BFG ATs with locked 4.56s making an impressive show, till it had enough and he limped home with the lie to cover his behind. FWIW, he had to pay for the entire trans rebuild, $1400. If he had not lied, I would have probably at least split it with him or something since I've wasted a few vehicles doing stupid things in my day (though never stupid enough to do neutral drops). Anyway, the point of all this is, how many of those, "I drove it like a grandma" stories are pure BS? How many don't really know what their son did with it when he took out the camper or whatever? Something else to think about...
So thats what happened to the 700r4 Russ. I certainly admire you for your parenting on that one. Like all others I did a few of those things in my day and probably will agian.
Damn, Russ. Are you sure you don't want to adopt another son? I know one that doesn't act like that! rotfl waytogo waytogo