I've had my Centurion for a little over two years and it has always shifted really smooth. I bought the car from an aamco transmission shop which had just rebuilt the transmission and installed a shift kit. The car would almost instantly shift through second and into third gear as you took off and the shifts would be barely noticeable. It would then stay in third gear until you came to a stop and then it would start in first again. If you did a full gas run it would not change until you reached a much higher rpm. So I had the car sitting for a few days and I changed the distributor in it to test it in a different car. When I took it for a drive it wouldn't do the immediate shift but it would rev longer and stay in first until 2000+ rpm's then give a hard shift, and the same would happen in shift 2-3. It wasn't a violent shift, but a lot firmer. If you drive it in first and you reach 2000 rpm's without having a shift and then you let it glide, the gas pedal feels like it isn't quite connected; it will rev the engine but not give a firm forward motion feel. If you stay in on the gas a bit longer it kind of catches up and will shift into second gear. If I go straight through the gears I don't notice this "slippage". I have since changed back to the initial distributor which is now recurved, but the situation is the same. Any ideas on this, will I damage the transmission by driving it like this, anywhere I can start looking to see what's going wrong? Or is this normal, something has just adjusted itself?
I would double-check all of the vacuum lines and make sure you didn't mix something up. The two ports on the carb are not the same- one has constant vacuum, but one for the distributor is placed slightly above the throttle blades so that you only get vacuum to the advance mechanism when the throttle is somewhat open. That's the first thing I'd check on your car, it could cause the problem you describe. -Bob C.
I just saw that I've already had this exact problem once before and I didn't remember that. Here's my last thread from nine months back: http://v8buick.com/showthread.php?t=83411 I must be getting a bit mushy in the fat ball between the ears or something. I'll look at that first solution of course.
