[450HP]

Originally Posted by wrightz28

Scott,

Thanks, that's the kind of stuff i'm looking for. Funny, the Buick had similar issues with a bad desing in the valve body. Looks like I'm going to be giving myself a crash course in Ford transaxles. Rebuilt an AOD transmission but not an axle.

Thanks again.

One thing that I was told that can really help these trannys out (and others for that matter).

Is to install an external tranny cooler.

The problem with our car's tranny the second time around is the intermediate clutch is
going out.

Our car's tranny was rebuilt by a small mom & pop shop that came very highly recommend
to us.

They look all the parts over really well, and replace the ones that are known to fail,
but reuse a lot of the original parts.

I don't know if you have a Certified Transmission shop in your area, but that's the shop
we should have use, as they replace all internal parts with new ones and dyno test
each transmission before it's ever put into a car.

For what it's worth, this same tranny is still used today in some Ford vehicles, albeit
with a few revisions.

So that should say something about the tranny's reputation.

If you rebuild it yourself, just read up on all the modifications that you can find to make
sure you do the job right the first time.

Oh, by the way, another problem we had was the check engine light come on intermittently.

Usually while accelerating during passing or coming on to the Interstate.

You would speed up, then maintain, then the light would come on for a few seconds, then
go out.

We bought the car from the original owners who told us the car had done that since it
was a month old... they took the car to dealers & mechanics... replaced this & that,
but never found the problem.

We bought the car with 127K miles on the clock, and it still did it... we took it to dealers
& mechanics and never found the problem either.

We even had the engine replaced with a Ford factory refurbished engine at 150K miles
and it still does it (the car now supports 161K miles).

I have talked to a guy that has a 92 Taurus with 40K miles on the clock and he told me
that his car does the same thing.

Seems to be isolated to the early 90's cars with the 3.8L V6 engine.

I'm a pretty good shade tree mechanic myself (my toy is a 74 Nova, 383 Stroker, &
one of less that 5K made with a factory four speed for 74).

I tried my hand at finding the problem, but came up empty handed like everyone
else.

The only codes the ECM would throw was, Bank 1 & 2 - running lean.

It boiled down to either a problem in the wiring harness or bad ECM programing.

Scott