I recently bought a 82 trans am with the auto transmission. I noticed if I'm at a dead stop and I put my foot down hard on the throttle, there is a fairly loud clunk noise that is coming from the rear end, like the tranny is slipping. Only seems to happen when going from neutral to 1st and if I go easy on it at the start line its fine. The car feel fine after 2nd gear I believe and it feels pretty powerful. I'm getting it looked at immedeatly tomorrow morning but I hope this isn't a serious issue. I'm sure there are people on the board more knowledgable than me when it comes to tranny problems.

 

check ur tranny mount

 

Too much backlash in the axle?
Mine had worn planetaries (spider gears?) which caused the play in the axle.

 

my camaro does this too, i have a pretty good feeeling that its a tranny mount. i have yet to check it out tho, not sure how to tell from under the car, i guess ill just jack it up today and look. but yeah thats EXACTLY what my car does, from a stop or really slow, floor it, feel this loud pop like the transmision is dislocating from its current position and then banging back into place.

 

do you rev real high in neutral then downshift into first to take off? if so that is a good way to destroy your tranny!

 

Ahhh good ol neutral slams!


Check the trans mount, fairly simple just put a jack under the tailshaft and see if the trans lifts up off the crossmember.

 

i just changed out the tranny mount tonight in about 1 hour, problem totally solved :-D

i got the 12 dollar mount from autozone with the lifetime warranty

it would have been a lot faster, like 20 minutes, but when i was jacking up the driveshaft, the jack would push it up and to the pass side, just the arc that the jack travels in, so i had to jack it up from the driver side to get it to pull it towards the driver side so that the holes for the crossmember lined up. then took it out for a drive and it chirps in second now haha (auto) that tranny mount was a huge chunk of my car problems. DO IT!!