so i picked up another TH400 tranny for the T/A this week, put in a brand new shift kit (Hurst stage 2/3-street-strip) and a new filter. this tranny was very clean on the inside.

well after 2 days of work i have it installed but.....

with 6 quarts of fluid in it it will shift back into N,D,2,1. it's sticking in reverse cause the cable is funky and when you push it back into park it just bends....

My Question..
it's a TH400 with a short pan, the torque converter lost very little fluid.. how many quarts does this thing take? a local mechanic said about 10, so with 10 in there it leaks out the gromet for the dipstick tube on the tranny and dosen't shift at all.

Anybody know ?

thanks,
Dave

 

*update*

i drained the pan, took apart the valve body and made sure everything was in the right place, there was 1 ball that was jammed somewhere it shouldn't have been. all put back together and it still will not go into gear!

this tranny was sitting in my buddies side yard for about 2 years attached to a 350, it was sealed up pretty good except for the cooler lines. anyone think that a band could have rotted out or something else funky could have happened to it ?


-Dave

 

Your local mechanic is correct - it should take about 10 or 11 litres of tranny fluid.

What you can do is fill it up so that the fluid on the dipstick reads just over full, fire it up and then immediately add another quart or two to bring it up to the bottom of the add mark (You don't want your fluid to read full when it's cold).

As for why you have no power in gear, I would check to make sure that the pickup/filter are engaged and that the pickup o-ring is in place and not cracked as it sounds like you have no line pressure.

If that doesn't solve you problem, I would begin to be suspicious of the shift kit installation.

 

well, the kit said to install 2 O-rings on the pickup tube, i only put 1 in there cause that's all that was in there to begin with (and the other one fell in the grass somewhere)

after doing some research i'm gonna go ahead and swap valve bodies. it very well could be a stuck shuttle valve (scary enough i did find some metal shavings in the pan after i dropped it the last time). hopefully it's just the valve body. i'll stick that other O-ring on that pickup tube and see if that helps too.

Hurst says to add 4 quarts of type F after the install, i used regular dextron3 ATF. i really don't think that would make a difference tho....er..hopefully not

 

Odd how your kit would say to install two o-rings. When I installed my trans-go it said to use only one.

If the manual valve is bent it may be hard to slide in out of gear. When I did my shift kit, i started bolting up the valve body with paying attention to where the manual valve was. I ended up bending the manual valve and cracking the valve body. You can check if your the manual valve is bent by pulling it and rolling it on a flat surface. If the manual valve is sticking in it's bore, you probably want to inspect the bore for scoring too.