Well... Been pricing used trannies for a few days now and it seems that the ones that are in the $350-450 price range either have acumulated a decent ammount of miles or are defective in some way. I saw one with less than 40k for 300 but that one had been incinerated.

I also noted that for about the same price or a little more I can get a good rebuild kit for my trans (pro-built kit looks pretty good). The one i have now seems mechanically sound as far as the planetaries and what not are concerned but it has protracted shifts and it fails to hold first gear under power. Now for the questions.

For those that have rebuilt their 700R4's,

1) What difficulties have you run into pre and post rebuild?

2) What parts do you find to be most commonly worn or broken that need to be replaced that are not typically included with rebuilt kits?

3) How difficult and/or time consuming was it for you to rebuld your tranny?

4) What guids/manuals/videos did you find useful and helpful?

My fear about getting a junkyard unit is taht itll be sloppy and itll quickly become defunct like my present trans. Hell, if a rebuild isnt too difficult, id rather do it myself and get a better, more enjoyable experience out of my trans in the end.

 

I am an ASE and GM Certifed tranmission tech, so some of my answers may not help, but I'll give it a whirl.

1) Problems? Very rarely do I run into problems. All the transmissions I do at work have to be restored back to 100% GM standards. As a result, you almost have to be sleeping to not put stuff back like it was. On the other hand, the rebuilds I do at home (yes, I have a tranny table and all the Kent-Moore tools at the house ) are far from stock and I sometimes have to change out governers, try a different accumulator spring, etc... The transmission is just a machine. As long as you put everything where it needs to be, it will work right.

2)Every tranny I do at home gets a new reaction planetary. Most kits will not come w/ hardparts, but I did notice that you can purchase one as an option from Pro-Builts kit. Get it! They are fairly inexpensive and its cheap insurance. I also put a full set of Torrington Bearings in. GM had a bad run of those bearings in around '97 and '98 in the 4L60-E, which uses the same bearings as the 700 and I just get nervous when they have alot of miles. The whole set can be bought for around $20, so once again, cheap insurance. Another part to keep a look at is the Reaction Sun Shell. Either at the dealership, or at the house, every one that I take down, gets a new sun shell when put back together. 1996 and later 4L60-E trannies seen TONS of failures because of these, and the 700 uses the same shell. Geeze, I could go on all day, this is getting pretty long....

3) I don't find them very difficult or time consuming. I can pull a tranny out, tear it down, rebuild it and put it back in, in a day. This is with a lift and air tools. (FWD and 4X4's excluded). If I'm on my back w/o a lift, I can have it done next day. This is where my answers won't help

4)I don't use a guide or video. I took my "hands on" training at the GM Training center in Atlanta and I get occasional updates via a satalite broadcast. The only "guide" I use is the TransGo instructions. I have done lots of the TransGo kits, but I don't trust my memory to do it all from my head.

 

hmmm...a proffessional...what the hell is causeing my car surge when i put it into gear. no sure how to expain it but the car jolts quickly. when im driving it is fine. also since i have never tried to even take the tranny off of the engine should an ametur try a rebuild?

 

I know it may be advanced work, but I'm sure others can benefit from your experience. Why not write a tech article? I'd put in there that it isn't for the faint of heart, the non mechanically inclined, and that w/o the proper tools it will can/winn (I dont know I never did it, but just might give it a shot, hell mines sitting in my car 100% dead!). Also put in all the cheap insurance stuff. I'd really like to see that. I could care less about my 700r4 right now so if I mess it up I don't care, I have the t-56 sitting, literally (well almost) on top of the 700r4.....its in the back seat area of my T/A lol. If I can do it, and I am confident about the work, I'll seel it on e-bay to make some of the t-56 wallet hits a little less painfull, obviously sold as-is since I would be in no way certified/even have the correct tools unless I find someone to borrow them from lol. Anyways, do it, if you are good, and know the common problems, and the good stuff to swap out etc, let us have some of that experience.

My background is more in computers....I can tell you past histories on lots of companies and therefore who to trust and who not to trust....for example, those new Soyo dragon boards, I wouldn't get w/i 10' of them until they have been out for 10 years. I lost a job because of *^%$ soyo having a problem w/ implementing the via chipset properly causing it to randomly reject certain AMD processors this was back in the k6-2 days...then you'd find one that worked....2 weeks later it'd be in for a rework, and they'd replace the processor...finding one that works, and then blame me. The problem wasn't officially recognized for some time, and there was no big deal made about it. How about a short story....Imac's OVERHEAT! I saw waaaaaay too many power-analog video boards replaced from heat damage....yes apple w/ their squeaky clean image had problems! Or how about the Via PCI implementation bug....back about 8 years ago via was the off brand known for poor quality....then AMD hit it "big" but didn't make their own chipsets, via filled the niche and struck it "big" too....unfortunatly, their old bad business practices held....they knew about a bug and didn't fix it until some Germans found that PCI throughput was extremely low, found the implementation bug, wrote a software patch for it, and made a big deal about it. There are 3 examples that I bet the average person going to build a computer would have no idea about....I'll bet most of us are the same way w/ rebuilding a tranny. Obviously, I can go out and say buy an Abit MB a WD HD (Despite their minor past problems they have always fixed them! unlike others) an Nvidia based vid card, Corsair, Micron, or Mushkin ram, blah blah blah, or I could say it has been my experience that Via sucks, Soyo sucks, SIS sucks, ATI is improving, Nvidia ROCKS, etc. The latter would be better imo....

Well there I went again, writing a friggen book! I probably didn't need to go into such excrutiating (sp) detail but I was ranting lol. Anyways, I hope you will consider writing us a good "step by step" but not exactly step by step lol (I understand there is really no such thing)
Corry

 

lol... computers... I used to LOVE pc's and when i was younger, under the table pc repair was my primary mode of income. Man does that bring back memories. Built my first pc when i was nine that had one of the first non-ibm 8 bit 'yes, finnally have 256 colors!!!' vga cards (hated taht microslot or whatever it was crap they had) an at&t 8086 processor, and dual 30 meg mfm drives, jsut to name a few of my mods. Oh, die hard 3dfx fan, btw. Shame they went under. Oh well... back on topic...

If i can pull it off financially, id like to get a pro-built auto but if i cant, I may consider trying to rebuild my old auto. I can say one thing for sure, I heard these auto's have over 1000 individual components in them so im sure that would be one helluva tech article if i did compose it . Ill definatly get all the litirature i can on the 700R4 if i do decide to rebuild and maybe i could get a tech article going. Ill have to see.

 

Well, I was more thinking the pro up there Mr. Bliss, just because he has had so much experience w/ them....
As far as computers, I do remember that microchannel....I got a free modem from my uncle....8 bit ISA....Went to put it in our IBM 286....that was my first venture into computer repair/upgrades lol. I ended up w/ a Pentium 90 and learned another lesson DON'T BUY ANYTHING W/ THE NAME OPTi on it!!!!! LOL the memory bus fried 1 year and a month after we got it....just out of warrantee. Most OPTi boards did this as well I found out after talking w/ fellow computer ppl lol. Its that kind of experience though that I use to select parts when I build computers, and all of my computers are rock solid, overclockable, and plenty fast Hell I'm still using my p3 800 and playing Ut2K3 in full detail mode! Its that kind of experience I'd like to be able to draw from in cars, experience I don't have, so I rely on tech articles, and logic.

 

hmmm...why does my computer act slow then...i have a ati motherboard, and athlon xp 1800+ processor, and a ati all-in-wonder video card with 64 megs of ram for vidoe, but when i play diablo it is slow. email me with some suggestions to make my computer faster.

ps i wonder what the moderators will do to this post when they see how off topic we are. lol

 

I seriously doubt hed ever have time to write a tech article, considering taht these trans techs work full time. Even if he did have the time, the ammound of knowlege these guys accumulate over the years could never be put into a compact article taht would be of any use. What id like to see is a tech article form someone who isnt a tranny tech and decided to attempt a rebuild. That would give all those who havnt done a rebuild and who are consideding it some idea of what one faces and the tech article would be written form the perspective of soemone who has similar abilities as the rest of us. A tranny tech would make it sound so easy to rebuild these things. After all, theyve gone and gotten specialized training and if they didnt know how to do these trans' of the top of thier heads like we know computers, then there wouldnt be to many succesful overhauls, would there . I know a few of the average joes have done their own rebuild and have had success with it. I would be cool to see an article or a good comprehensive post from one of them.

 

That may be fine, but I would want one of these tranny techs going over it and telling us if something is totally wrong, and then trow in their experience like seriously you really should replace the reaction planetary even though the install kits don't come w/ it. Stuff like that, things that you only find out after rebuilding several trannies, not just one. Also they could look over it and maybe see in it "I had a real hard time with part x and part y. The book said it was supposed to be real easy but DONT BELIEV IT!" or something similar, then have one of the experienced guys come in and fix it and say "Although the book will tell you to put partx in before part y, its a real pain to get them to go in, instead, I have found it is MUCH easier to put partx in AFTER party! It'll save you 20 mins of frustration and possibly breaking something!" See what I mean? There's only so much you can learn from one rebuild. You arent going to become a great PC tech by building one computer, or fixing one major problem. Even after doing 100's of trannies, I am sure there are still things to learn! I know it is such in computers. Not really relevent anymore, but in the windows9x era we would see lots of "Windows protection error. You must restart your computer" This would send you into an endless cycle of reboots. Even an experienced tech would say reinstall windows. A Really good tech would go into safe mode and start pulling drivers until it booted, or would pull cards until it booted. A super experienced tech would do a logged boot, see which drivers failed to load (filenames only) and be able to match up something like say sparrow.sys to bing a bad SCSI card driver. I am sure there are equivilents in cars as well. Thats why I want an experienced tech going over it a few times, maybe even a few experienced techs going over it a few times and adding comments/changing things as necessary.

 

I wouldn't mind doing it, but the problem is, I don't know how much use it would be. I have personally invested over $1,000 purchasing Kent-Moore tools to service the 700R-4/4L60/4L60-E at my house. NOBODY in there right mind would make that kind of investment to rebuild there tranny, or even to do theres and a friends. I purchased those tools because I won't do it any other way and I do at least one tranny a month (its more of a hobby than an income). I did lots of them at work, using the shops tools and tables, I didn't want anything less for my house. The transmission table w/ the correct holding fixture puts the tranny right where you need it. Its at the right heigth, it can be held vertical for installing all the hard parts, then quickly swiveled horizontal to install the valvebody, etc... Not something that can easily be done working on a workbench or whatever people have in there garage.

I could do the article, but there is alot of information to cover and alot of pictures that would not be dialup friendly. Not to mention the tool issue. Alot of people don't reccomend rebuilding at the house, because of the tools required, the space, and cleanliness. These parts must be clean on assembly. And when I mean clean I don't mean scraping the crud off the outside, I mean the tiny grain of sand that might get in there and shred a bushing or score the pump body.

 

I've been rebuilding a 200-4r, and I planned to take pictures
as I went through it. But it didn't take long to see that I wouldn't get anything done if I were to clean the oil from my hands and take pictures. There are already a few decent manuals out, and
Technical Videos has a bunch of VHS videos on the market.
I'm not saying it would be a waste of time for someone to make
another book or video, but I have seen some errors in the ones I
have used, and unfortunately the novice would not know good
information from bad. As far as tools go, I have some factory-made tools and a lot I made myself. Take the 2-4 Band Apply Pin
Tool J-33037, for example. I don't know anybody who uses one or even has one except maybe the local GM dealers. And their mechanics may not use it, either. Anyway, I just take the tranny apart in units and keep them separated, check them for hard part damage, and rebuild each one in the order it goes into the case. After all, a tranny is just a bunch of subassemblies crammed into one case.