[Clancy68]

thats kind of odd that it won't roll in gears. i can understand if it didn't roll in park and rolled in all the gears including neutral. becuase thats a manual linkage in the transmission. being that your getting some kind of indication out of a gear means you have oil preassure(i think anyway), so i wouldn't jump imediatly to a broken pump drive or anyother hard parts for that matter...yet
does the engine build revs as quickly and as freely when you put it in gear as say park or neutral? that should indicate some kind of load on the engine. im thinking you may have something more like a valve in the valve body hanging up. which can happen pretty easily as i understand especially if the assembly was not clean. i think you might want to give the shop that built it a call and see what they say. as far as a 700-r4 i think they are great trannys, as everyone says, you can't go wrong with overdrive, a lock up converter helps too.
but some people still give them a lot of undeserved wrap due to some early durability issues from when they first started producing them.
i feel your best bet is to have one locally built, becuase you can always take it back to the guy and speak to him in person. Im sure the majority of tci transmissions are great, however i have heard about and personally witnessed some problems. ive heard about leaking and other small problems, and i have witnessed a th-400 blow up, basically the tci unit sheared off all the lugs in the case. so the guts were switched to another case... a few weeks later same problem, and a phone call to a performance transmission shop the following day for a custom built 400, no problems since the new one went in. sorry for the long post, hope this helps.

--Scott