blown transmission

35

Asked by Michael Apr 14, 2010 at 01:24 PM about the Dodge Shadow

Question type: General

Im just wondering for fun how many people here have blown up the 3 speed automatic trannies in their shadows by manually shifting it I personally have blown 2 in 11 thousand kilometers anyone else that has done something close or equivilant feel free to comment or share

3 Answers

35

i blown one last summer it's because my kick down jam in the transmission so i change for another 3 speed with under 100 000 km and now its OK

215

I blew Three on my Dodge Spirit, it's still the same tranny!

1 people found this helpful.
10

I have had a '91 shadow convertible for the last 25 years. I purchased it as a repo with about 80,000 miles on it back then. Whoever owned it apparently rarely changed the oil which damaged the engine bearings to where it carried low oil pressure. Although it still ran OK, the solution was to swap in another 2.5L which had only 20K miles when installed. I drive this vehicle almost daily and, have racked up another quarter of a million miles on top of the original 80K. I did replace the original starter about 6 months prior. Nonetheless, I've never seen a starter make it past 300,000 miles until now. However, if I have found one engineering flaw in this vehicle it would be in the A-413 auto tranny. That is the forward clutch has a nasty habit of shearing the teeth off of the unlined clutch plates. This is as opposed to ordinary wear on an auto tranny clutch pack which might dictate replacement only after a very long period of service. Apart from that glitch, the A-413 in mine has otherwise performed flawlessly for 25 years. Over that period of time It has shifted perfectly regardless of use and outside temperature. And I would be the first to admit to not regularly adhering to the recommended service schedule for tranny oil and filter service. But I have rebuilt the forward clutch pack about every 100,000 miles. Two ways to get past such clutch pack failure would be to avoid "hot rodding" the car. The other would be to have a skilled tranny expert modify the clutch pack to add more unlined clutch plates. Most of the A-413's that were coupled up to 4 bangers originally had only 3 unlined plates. If this number can be bumped up to 4 plates, the service life of this clutch pack could easily double. In short, I probably do less maintenance on my 27 year old Shadow than I do on some cars with 1/4th the mileage. This is even including issues related to the tranny. And, likely due to the fact that I drive mostly highway miles, it consistently averages around 30 mpg.

1 people found this helpful.

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