Ok so I'm on another long road trip. The trans has already stopped working once before the trip (has had fluid/filter changes) but I had to go anyway. Had hard shifting before the trip. About 500 miles into the journey the car went into violent seizures. I traced it to the overdrive function "EP" mode. I found out that if I tapped the EP switch when I wanted to shift into top gear then quickly switched to SP mode without accelerating, it would hold that gear and not down shift. So that worked and got me there. On the way back 4th gear started shuddering at high speeds, reverse made a horrible sound, and there was slippage at low speeds. I tried some Lucas additive that didn't do much but I made it home barely. I think I was dazed or something but I wondered into the auto parts store to buy more additives that don't work. Out of the 5 choices I suppose I guessed right. I picked up a bottle of Greased Lightning. I didn't expect much and figured I had nothing to loose at this point since I'm buying a rebuilt one very soon anyway. The stuff is magic. It brought my gears back, killed the noise, and no more hard shifting. Overdrive still doesn't work right but it's better.
The moral of this story is: Everyone says not to add anything but Dextron to your trans because that's how it was engineered blah blah blah. Up until today I would agree. I'm going to buy a second bottle and see if it fixes the rest of the problems. Every shop in the area says it's dead and needs to be rebuilt. I'll post my results and see how much extra life it adds before it totally dies. It should be dead already. For less that $8 my car is fun to drive again and I get to keep my money this month.
Anyone know what would cause shudders in EP but not SP in top gear?