Andre1969
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
I had an 85 Silverado as well. It was silver and blue, Cowboy's colors. Biggest POS ever produced by GM. Everything on that truck broke, I mean everything from the power windows to the torque converter, even the paint failed after a couple of years. Last GM I purchased....
Did yours have the 3-speed or 4-speed automatic? Mine never had a lick of transmission trouble, but it has the 3-speed, which is a fairly rugged, durable unit called the THM350, and dates back to 1969, I believe...an era when GM usually got things right from the get-go. I think the 4-speed unit was called the 700R4 and while it was supposedly based on the THM350, it wasn't just that former transmission with an overdrive gear added. Rather, GM found a way to go through it, redesign it, and "modernize (i.e., cheapen) it. And sadly, they never did seem to get it right. In later years, it was revised again and called the L4-60E or something like that. My uncle had a '97 Silverado that ate two of them. Even well into the 2000's, Edmunds.com did a test of a Silverado wit that transmission, and it failed during their testing.
That transmission was one of the things that swayed me from a Chevy/GMC to a Dodge when I bought a new truck in 2012. I just wanted a fairly cheap, basic truck, but if you got that at GM, you were still stuck with that same transmission. But, as Karma would have it, the transmission in my Ram has been a sore spot. It hasn't actually failed, but I don't like the way it shifts...sometimes it seems slow to react. It also stalled out on two separate occasions in the driveway. At first I didn't realize that was transmission-related, but then one time I started it, and it seemed really lethargic. It got me to work, but I noticed it wasn't shifting. Turns out it had gotten stuck in 4th gear somehow, and wouldn't upshift or downshift. I turned it off and on again, and that reset it. That was probably what made it stall the other two times. It pulled that 4th gear stunt one more time, but that was about two years ago, and the problem hasn't come back.
Paint was a funny thing back then, too. I'm guessing your blue/silver was metallic...and metallic just didn't hold up back then. It would get even worse in 1987, when they switched to more environmentally friendly paint. Mine is red/white, but non-metallic, and still fairly shiny, after 30 years. It's getting weak though. If I wash it, it'll turn the water red!
Also, I remember the driver's side power window motor being the first thing to fail on our '85 Silverado. But, that wasn't until it was about 6 years old.