Circling back to Monday and the transmission rear seal being pushed out, the situation brings a couple of things to light:

First of all, I have a tendency to be overly fanatical on trying to build reliability into the car. This probably stems from the experience of my first to drag week adventures with Jay. Jay was a pioneer in this drag and drive stuff. They learned from hard experience all the stuff that can go wrong when you try and drive a racecar on the street. So in 07 and 08, we were working on repairing the car constantly.
So when I heard that these T 56 magnums can cook the gears in the front of the transmission on a dragstrip pass, and that there was a pump that could be installed in the front cover that would pump fluid back to the front, that modification fit perfectly into my obsession. But after installing the pump, I had only driven on local streets short distances. Never on the freeway.
So that leads to the second thing: when the car breaks down on the road, I have a tendency to act too quickly and not really think it through thoroughly. On Monday when we discovered the problem, I felt the transmission and it seemed abnormally hot for short drive we had taken. Could the pump have created excessive heat or pressure inside the transmission that pushed the seal out? I had no issues in 2018 with the transmission, and the seal had not been removed from the tail housing since. So in my hasty judgment, I decided the pump had to be causing the issue. My first thought was to take the transmission apart and remove the pump. I could see that the trunk monkey had no interest in that idea. My next school of thought was that usually when a pump is installed in these transmissions, it is to move fluid through an external cooler. I did it without the cooler, because I had not previously had a temperature issue. I just wanted the fluid back on the front gears. So installing a cooler seemed like the thing to do to solve the problem. And that’s what I did.
Besides a huge thank you to Matt and Lance for rescuing us, I definitely need to give a shout out to Becky at the Plainwell Michigan NAPA store! I walked in the door asking for a transmission cooler and a strange combination of fittings. Becky went right to work on the problem, immediately understood exactly what I was talking about and what I needed, and worked through several potential solutions until she came up with one that worked perfectly. Awesome service and extremely knowledgeable counter people!
In hindsight, the very first thing I should have done when the seal pushed out was to remove a floor panel to check the vent on top of the transmission. No matter how much heat or pressure the pump tried to produce, it should’ve gone out through the vent and not affected the rear seal. But I didn’t think of that at the time. The second time the seal pushed out I did think of that. I sucked on the vent tube and it was open, in proper working order. And my opinion of the transmissions temperature was pure folly. Without a measuring device what good is it to stick my hand on there and say it’s hot? I’m afraid that the whole escapade of installing the cooler was a waste of time. I think the seal was just a piece of crap and fitted too loosely into the housing. Oh, well. Live and learn!

some random pictures: my time slip from Monday, everybody's friend Jesse brought this crazy John Deere race tractor he named Junior, the guy with the white Monte Carlo helped me out in the tech line by lending me tools to work on the brake light switch dilemma, the yellow hot Rod is also in the same class as I.