What does it do? Is a 2600 stall good? New to this.

 

It lets the engine get higher in the power band faster and is most helpful off the line. A good stall can take like 5 tenths off in the quarter. I got a used vigilante off the board. 2800 stall but they say the vig stall a bit higher mabye 3000 or 3200 than their ratings.
I don't even know I have the stall in daily driving with my 3.42 gear swap and for sure you won't with your 3.73. Heck I would likely try to go 3200 vig or maybe even 3600 but the 2800/3.42 combo works good for me and already makes it hard to launch on street tires.
I think its a great mod. With really no downside until you get really high stall or maybe another make is much looser. Anyway my 2800 vigilante..

 

I'll try to make it simple...

Imagine a torque converter as two fans, one plugged in, one not. As the one that is plugged in moves faster, the air flowing through the other fan flows faster, and forces the fan blades to speed up. One "fan" is attached to the engine, and the other is attached to the transmission, and instead of air, there is fluid.

The stall speed is a little harder to explain. In theory, let's say you bolted the wheels to the ground so they couldn't move, put the transmission in drive, and floored it. The maximum rpm attainable is known as the stall speed. In reality, it's the rpm in 1st gear when you floor it off the line, or sometimes people refer to it as the rpm where the rear tires lose traction while the brakes are held, although that's usually fairly inaccurate.

Stall speed is also somewhat engine dependent. If you were to follow the same theory and bolt the wheels to the ground, and had a 200 hp engine and a 400 hp engine, the 400 hp engine would be able to turn the torque converter faster because it can force the fluid in the torque converter faster than the 200 hp engine.

The reason a torque converter is also known as a torque mulitplier is not because it allows the engine and transmission to operate at different speeds, unlike a manual trans, where the engine and transmission are always locked together. So the engine can turn at 2k rpm, while the input shaft on the transmission is only turning at 1k rpm. So the torque converter is giving the transmission more torque than the engine can produce at 1k rpm by allowing the engine to turn faster.

That's about the limit of my knowledge on torque converters, other than that I think you would probably be happy with a 3000 stall, lockup torque converter. TCI makes good ones, or so I hear. Keep in mind that a stall converter won't do much good, unless you have the traction available to get the added power to the ground.

 

I wrote a brief primer on torque converters. Go to www.kennedysdynotune.com and then go to "Tech Tips".

Rich

 

would i need a tune for a tc?