Is Lloyd Butfoy the only guy that can inspect / rebuild these beasts?
No, there are a handful of others out there who have the experience, special tools, and parts. Dennis Quella of Pantera Performance Center comes to mind (
Pantera Performance), although when I talked to him last week he told me that he had 22 (!) customer ZF gearboxes lined up waiting to be rebuilt. When he did mine back in the early 1990s he wasn't nearly this busy--and it took him two and a half years to get around to it! I would guess that if you dropped a gearbox in his lap now you wouldn't see it until 2010 at least.
If you live in the south, there is a fellow named Guy Trigeaux who does excellent work. He is a recent immigrant from Belgium; for 25 years he was the head of the service department for the largest De Tomaso distributor in the world. He also raced (and still owns) one of the 14 factory lightweight Gr4 race Panteras. Only a few people in the world have the complete ZF gearbox tool kit (back in 1993 Dennis Quella told me that ZF charged $90,000 just for this tool kit!!!!), and Guy is one of them. He is retired and lives in Simpsonville, S.C., about 80 miles from Atlanta, in one of those communities where each home has an airplane hangar. He has an airplane, and a couple of cars in his hangar, and also does ZF work there on a onesy-twosy basis.
Other capable folks (friends of mine, all of them) are Les Gray in Phoenix (who used to work at Hall Pantera, was the president of the Pantera Owner's Club of America (POCA), also owns one of the 14 Gr4 race cars, and now runs a racing/sports car repair shop; among other things he does all the ZF work for Jim Click's original GT40 race car), Frank Jerome in Dallas, and Bobby Byars in So-Cal (
www.precisionproformance.com; he's a good friend of Lloyd's and sometimes helps Lloyd with backlogged ZF work). John Taphorn of Houston is the outgoing president of POCA, and while admittedly an amateur compared to the rest of the aforementioned professionals, he has successfully rebuilt a handful of Pantera gearboxes.
All of these guys are getting their parts from Lloyd, as he's the only manufacturer. Oh, and apropos of nothing I talked to Lloyd yesterday; he was fresh from the hospital after watching the birth of his first child, and was right back at work in his new, larger and supposedly much more spiffy workshop, which I plan to see in a couple of weeks.
It's worth mentioning that the seller of the E-bay Dash-Zero gearbox in question is Cory Gehling, of Collector's Choice in Dane, Wisconsin, which is a shop that for many years specialized in Panteras, and now has focused more on the Viper due to the larger market. I don't know if Cory is ZF-savvy, but it wouldn't surprise me if he was. I don't know him particularly well but in all my dealings with him over the past 20-odd years, he seemed to be a very straight shooter.
I believe this gearbox should be reunited with its original car, don't you? For general use I'd MUCH rather have a Dash-2, with oodles of parts availability, than the first-generation Dash-0 like this one. The overhaul costs on this gearbox will likely be significantly higher than a Dash-2 in similar condition.
