Me and transmission have a long history. In my Talon I wore out the stock clutch, and replaced it with a high performance clutch, and ripped the clutch facing off of it within a few months (too many 4500 rpm clutch dumps, awesome take off with AWD, murder on the clutch). I had it replaced with a stronger clutch, but the shop that did that forgot to replace the throw-out bearing. It had trash in it from the previous failure. This caused the bearing to fail later, which they fixed for free.

My truck came with a 904 in it, and when I put the Magnum 300 in it I put in another 904. The transmission made it about 6-7 months before I busted the front planetary. Well about 8 months later the engine would flair between 2-3, but only under hard throttle. Kicking up the throttle lever (aka kickdown lever, just on top of the gear selector on the tranny) seemed to fix the problem, but I couldn't get WOT anymore.

A few months later I was down in College Station visiting a friend when it started flaring again when going into third under just about any throttle position (except closed). Mind you I was 200 miles from home, I moved the throttle lever further backwards (it now shifted into 3rd at nearly 40 mph at light throttle). I did get home with no problems.

However, I drove it to work the next day (Monday) no problems, but on the way home it started slipping BAD in third. I fixed that by driving home in "2". I attempted (why? I don't know) to drive to work the next day in 2nd, and made it about 5 miles before it started slipping real bad from a stop. I admitted defeat and parked the truck in the nearest parking lot, and called "Dad's Towing Service" to tow me home.

I've had it with 904's (998's and 999's too), so I found a 727 from an 85 1/2 ton pickup to put in my truck. I had it rebuilt with a Trans-Go shift kit. I pulled the 904 out and gave it a post mortem, the front clutches and kickdown band were burned BLACK, the rear clutches were still good (orange). The pan had a lot (piles) of fine metal particles in it, as did the valve body (top side). This poor transmission didn't have much of a chance, it only had 4 clutches in the front clutch retainer, and 4 in the rear. 904's behind v8's (999's) are supposed to have 5 front clutches

Unfortunately the rebuild on the 727 didn't take well, it would act like it was out of gear when taking off from first, then BAM it would hit first hard. The other problem was the 2-3 shift, it would start out at 35, then after a few minutes of driving it start to creep upwards, to the point that it would not shift into 3rd. About the time it started to increase the shift point it would also hunt between 2nd and 3rd so long as the speed was near the shift point (this was REALLY irritating in stop and go traffic). It got the point that 1st was slipping BAD from a stop, so I parked the truck after driving it a total of two days. It had spent the better part of a week at the shop (prior to me parking it) and they did nothing but mess up the shift linkage. So after it started slipping bad I pulled the tranny and rebuilt it with a Turbo Action Tranz-box kit. Upon dis-assembly I found that I had a 3 clutch front retainer (it should have been 4), but the rear was a 4 clutch retainer . I replaced it with a 4 clutch retainer (in the picture it is on the right, the piston has not been transferred into the new clutch retainer. Notice the ridge on the upper side, the 3 clutch is lower than the 4 clutch). I also ditched the stock 2.9 ratio kickdown lever for the 5.0 in the kit. For the curious, here is a picture of the differences between a 904 and 727 clutch retainer (front) and clutches.

In typical Strickland fashion all the work I did did nothing to the problems... I gave up and took it to another shop.

And on a lighter note, for all the ladies who actually read this. My picture.

Here are some other 727 transmission pictures.