Smart move, all you can do is give him your best advice and let him make the final decisions. In something that weighs as much as his 36 I think he would be very disappointed with the performance off the line with those gears, and while 350 Chevies are great motors, they aren't exactly torque monsters.

In the old days we called rear ends with high ratio gears "Western" rear ends. The reason was that in the flat States you didn't need a lot of hill climbing torque, like you would back East, so the car manufacturers back then sold one ratio to the dealers in those flat States, and another, deeper ratio in the States with hills and mountains. A friend had a 50 Ford that came with a Western set of gears and overdrive 3 speed to boot. It was really dead on the hills, but once you got it going on the flat sections it would wind forever. I don't know if the auto makers still do that or not.

Don