Now seriously, come on Jim, I know you love the T5 and post that same 6 paragraphs of bandwidth every time one of us poo poos it, but... We are not talking about a leisurely drive on Sunday afternoon with an inline 6. Again, I implore you to read his build list.
As you said in your post "We don't race or go too awfully fast either. I may built a tear-drop to haul... maybe. we don't pull too very much w/ this truck and it has a 292" because you truly know if you dump the clutch and powershift into second, that T5 is gonna blow and first gear in the camaro trans makes getting moving with a full load difficult.
gofstbuick is going to be pumping out in excess of 430 ft-lbs of torque across powerband with the power in his engine being made between 2300rpm and 6500 rpm and requires the use of a 2800 stall speed converter in an automatic application. That is not the engine we are normally talking about on this forum, nor do most of us here care about or are impressed by such an application.
jack halton is awesome and his tech tip has helped plenty of guys, but he is not running anything close to the 383 described above in his Jimmy, but it is ten times cooler than any v8 truck I can think of.
Try f-body.org or thirdgen.org for their opinion if you don't like mine. Sorry, but a T-5 cannot handle that power for long. He will have to wind the engine up or it will be a pig down low, when he does wind it up, that kind of torque is gonna munch the transmission when the rear spings wind up on him.
I've installed a bunch of T5s for guys and think it is great behind a 235 or 250 (or jeep 258). I like the S10 for the low first gear, but if I was building a hot rod, I would opt for the camaro close ratio with the high first gear. I ran the 4 cylinder T5 behind a 235 after I munched second gear in a saginaw, I really like it. I am not bigotted against it, its a good transmission in the right application, this isn't it.
