Need some ideas/help

[Jimmy Magnum]

Been a while since I posted here. Life stuff and all that. Anyway, I have a 1970 C10 longbed. I'm kind of caught between selling my truck or making it a project, only because it currently isn't in working order. I'm strapped for cash right now, so a project would be way off. I have an HHR as my daily driver (don't hate, I really like the car lol), so my truck is sitting at the side of the house in my back yard.

In the chance that I do decide to keep the truck, I do plan on converting it to a short bed and swapping the rear end, but the power plant and transmission is also going to be swapped out.

I'm thinking of acquiring an LQ4/9, but the transmission is another story. Right now, I have a TH350 mated to my 350SBC. It has a shifter on the floor that allows me to manually shift between gears, or keep it in drive and allow it to run as a full automatic. I like having control of the gears like that, with the option to do full auto.

What I don't like, though, is the fact that it's a forward shift pattern, and there's been a number of times I accidentally overshot third gear and went into neutral (thankfully never in reverse), so I wish I had a reverse pattern on there.

Anyway, I was wondering if any GM 4 speed automatics are available that are pretty strong (as I might do some performance upgrades in the future) and allow that same kind of control, but in a reverse pattern valve body, and can mate to an LQ4/9 with little to no hassle. I was considering a 4L80, but no luck finding anything on one that had what I was looking for.