So, an update on the situation with my 8-speed transmission. The LR4 is still in the shop. I had to fly to Michigan instead of driving, leaving the dog back in Washington. Gotta say I didn’t mind missing a 3-4 day drive across country. But it would have been nice to not HAVE to make that call and get an airline ticket.
It went into the shop for fluid changes all around, and in the case of the transmission I’d asked them to put in a Zip Kit because very occasionally, I thought I was detecting a bit of a slip between gears 1 & 2. Very intermittent, but given that this is going to be towing eventually, I didn’t want to just hope for the best. So I asked for the Zip Kit, a filter change, and a transmission flush.
After a couple of attempts to put it back together without the pan leaking, they reported that it would no longer go past 5th gear. They couldn’t figure out why, so I gave up and bought the airline ticket, to give them a lack of rush to work on it. That was a couple of weeks ago.
What they said they did was to “ordered a master rebuild kit so that we can measure original, zip kit, and rebuild parts while it is apart.” They did that, and didn’t really find anything different.
A week later, I started calling again. I finally got the owner on the line, and last night he reported that they have concluded the issue is “up further in the transmission” from the valve body they had worked on. That the B clutch failed the vacuum and air pressure tests. I asked him what he thought might have caused that to happen after the vehicle was in their shop, and he said that “sometimes the debris in the fluid” is what is (paraphrasing here) helping to provide friction to the clutch, and changing the fluid makes a worn clutch issue suddenly worse.
I told him I’d never heard of that, and it seemed like fluid changes were often a good idea. He said “No, it’s a pretty common problem.”
His offered solution was that he’d found a “good condition used” transmission that he could put in there instead, with only a few thousand miles more than the tranny that’s in it and faulty. Total cost for all the work would be $6500.
I asked him why we wouldn’t suspect that this replacement tranny wouldn’t fall victim to the same thing, and he really didn’t have a good response to that. I asked him to please email his diagnosis and any other info he had to me so I could get it in writing.
So I’m asking the group here for some collective wisdom.
1. Does this seem like a plausible failure mode? Or is it more likely that they introduced some debris, or the wrong fluid, or something else that effed it up?
2. Is there a shop near Portland, Oregon that I should just take it to instead, who would know better what to do with this tranny?
