Sad Story On a Gear Vendors OD

A local buddy came up with a used GV overdrive for his 71 Swinger and I offered to help him with it since he had never done much of anything gear train wise before.
We split the hump under the drivers seat and welded in a section to make a taller hump to clear the overdrive unit, re designed his exhaust pipes to go around it by taking a section out of both pipes behind his crossover and adding them in the front to move the crossover behind the OD unit.
We shortened a spare driveline to fit the new longer unit, and moved all his good U joints to the shortened driveline.
Got it all installed, filled with fluid, wired up and.....It didn't work.:(

We could hear the solenoid activating but overdrive wasn't there.
Come to find out it was a destroyed unit with metal slivers in the screen filter.:BangHead:

Well, for 800 bucks Gear Vendors apparently will take a bad unit and rebuild or replace it, so this is what he is going to do.
I tried to talk him into doing a 42RH OD swap because we could do it for around 400 bucks total and that includes the shift kit for it, but no go.:D
He has a mildly hopped up 318 so the 42RH would be the ticket in my opinion.
He wants that GV unit.

The GV unit came out of a stockish van and shouldn't have been trashed by too much power, so we figure it must have been abused in some other way.

Bummer.
That just bites. A lot of work to get to that point.