I picked up the car today. It drives a lot better now with the larger T-bars and offset shackles installed. The car never had a trans leak, it was just engine blow-by, so I need to look into that now.

I drove the car from the shop to my work and then to my gf's house (about 30 miles all on streets) and it seemed to do fine. Later on in the day, my gf and I went on a little joy ride and the Dart was great. My gf was ecstatic and loved it. It was really fun.

Well, a couple hours later I had to take on the 30 mile journey home (mostly freeway). When I started the car, I kind of had a feeling there was a problem. I could sort of hear a little clunking noise from the car as it was idling and every time I pushed the clutch pedal it went away, but I wasn't sure. I put the car in reverse and backed out and as I shifted into 1st and was moving forward, it sounded like a mystery bolt came loose and clunked around for a second, dropped out of the car, then the car stopped and shut off. Keep in mind, the car was still a little cold (135-150F water temp) and has shut off on me when trying to move the car in 1st if it's not too warm (I rushed the warm up a little as I was trying to get home as it was late). I immediately started the car back up again and the noise was gone. I didn't want to scare my gf, so I drove away, planning on pulling over in a nearby neighborhood in case something happened as I didn't want her to worry (I know, not the smartest idea).

Well, as I was driving, the car felt fine, until I got on the freeway. It could just be me since I haven't driven the car in 2 months, but it felt like the car was fighting itself to stay at speed (70-80 mph). My frame of reference could be out of wack because I just got a new daily driver last week and have been driving that a lot. But I also noticed that when I hit the exhaust drone RPM band and tried cruising at that speed that the vibration was a lot more than usual, but would smooth out significantly after I raised the engine speed outside of drone RPM. Lastly, what I thought was kind of weird, and I don't remember it doing this before, was that sometimes when I'd try to accelerate to pass a car (let's just say I'm at 2500 RPM in 5th gear) the RPM would rise to about 3000 (still in 5th) for a second or two, but the car would stay at the same speed, then the RPM would drop to about 2700 RPM and it would increase speed by a small amount. This also did sometimes occur when shifting from 5th to 6th and vice versa. It may have done it before, but who knows, my memory could be off.

Anyways, I ended up getting home safe, but now I'm all freaked out that I have a transmission problem and I'm tired of spending money on this car. I swear this car hates me. I'm pretty frustrated with it at this point and if this ends up being something big, I'm parking the car until next June (when I finish my masters) because I don't have the time, patience, or money anymore to work on it. But who knows, this could all just be me and my tiredness.