Fords Chinese transmission wonders..

But the materials might be coming from elsewhere.* I expect that these are DIN (Germany) spec materials and I don't think Gertag is going to put up with the old 'same thing' from Chinese suppliers.

*I've personally experienced this.

As I read through the web forums it seems that the transmission's internals are victims rather than causes with a couple exceptions. Ford apparently revised the sycros and one racing parts supplier damaged a shift fork and then proceeded to more strongly weld the shift forks and change the pads to bronze. They are of course using the car as a testbed for their products.

Ford has also revised the clutch pedal assembly, the clutch, and the pressure plate bolts. As I boil out the more reasonable sounding posts the issue seems to be converging on things that make for poor shifts that damage the transmission rather than transmission damage that causes poor shifting. Many owners are having success with different lubicants and aftermarket shifter components.

the fact that some are reporting to have had 2-3-and even 4 transmissions either means there are either trolls spreading falsehoods or that driving style is a major factor or that the problem is outside the transmission. Not saying they are abusing the car, just that how they drive it plays a role** and/or the problem is outside the transmission and not being fixed and just toasts one trans after another. Statistically it is highly unlikely for them to get that many bad transmissions from the sort of manufacturing facility this one comes from.

**Sometimes customers use a product in some way that isn't foreseen. It often isn't wrong, just different and results in a failure that just wasn't seen in testing because nobody thought to use it that way. It's still got to be fixed of course.
Reply to
Brent
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electronics, yes. most electronic component manufacturers are still leery about chinese factory intellectual property theft, but as you probably know, most assembly is done in china after components are imported.

for "low tech" mechanical stuff like transmissions, materials are more commonly locally sourced. it doesn't make a lot of sense to import stuff costing only $150 a ton.

this is a major screw up. frod synchros used to be bullet proof. i've driven a frod stick without benefit of clutch for months with no apparent ill effects. for this transmission to fail in this application so quickly is simply ridiculous.

it absolutely should be able to handle it. end of story. the old frod stick transmissions could take it - they're probably the only thing frod that you won't hear me ripping on.

if the transmissions are bad, then it's a statistical certainty they'll all be the same!

Reply to
jim beam

Me too, but I'm not sure I agree.

There are some folks in China who care about quality, even though most of the manufacturing folks (especially the larger manufacturing concerns) are just into volume and getting paid.

The problem is that the folks who do care about quality and do want to make a good product usually have no idea what a good product is.

You have folks on the production line who were farmers a year ago. You have folks who are making tooling who were on the production line a year ago. You have "design engineers" who were making tooling a year ago. Most of them are either self-taught or were taught by co-workers.

Thus, you get machinists who have never seen a gauge block and "designers" who don't know why that part is there but knows that everybody else uses it so they use it too.

This situation is not one conducive to quality. It's made worse when Western companies go into China and don't want to train workers for fear that they will leave and go elsewhere with their knowledge and designs.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

It's a Mustang. You expect people to drive it hard, that's why they buy the damn thing. You sell a sports car, it needs to be able to hold up to sporty driving.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

My personal experience was pre-plated sheet metal. Thin stuff that had to be stamped with a tight tolerance on flatness.

Ford hasn't made it's own manual transmissions in a very long time. At least for passenger car applications.

At the end I wrote that.

No. Perhaps if an untested design were released. But that's not the case with Getrag and Ford. If it is design then something is happening that design and testing did not foresee or the design has too narrow of a production process window. (production units are not the same as the test units) These are the only ways they are 'all the same' and bad. That is with consistent manufacturing.

If it is manufacturing then by definition we are looking at production variation. Good manufacturing is very much the same every time. The bell curve is tall, centered, and narrow. Bad manufacturing is wide and flat and/or off center. If it's 'made-in-China' disease then Ford would have stop shipped on this issue. They've stopped shipped (QC hold) on far less with mustang. For a single person to get multiple badly manufactured transmissions would require a staggering rate of failure. Something way above what companies like Getrag and Ford should experience in their own plants in China. Not even Harbor Frieght tools has that rate of 'bad ones'. The warranty costs again would drive ford to stop ship.

Reply to
Brent

indeed. but with respect, a mustang is not a sports car, it's a muscle car. it can't handle for shit. and frankly, it's not that fast either.

Reply to
jim beam

you're missing my point and snipped the explaination (**) which answers this. I'll do it again in story form: A couple years ago I released a product to production. It passed all of the company's tests. It went through field testing with actual users with flying colors. Soon after being out for sale users were breaking it. Badly. I got the field returns. Figured out what they were doing. It was abusive... reinforced it because well there's no other choice. Haven't heard a peep of complaint since.

It's not a question of driving it hard. Ford undoubtly has tests that drive the car harder than anyone should. But what are people doing that breaks this one? Such tests are developed with past knowledge. Let's say there is a very subtle thing that people do when driving such a car. All the past transmission systems dealt with it just fine but there's no test for it because nobody saw this detail before. Now a new design is weak in that area. It doesn't show up in the tests. It passes everything... gets to the field and people break it. Early and fast. In a well run company tests will now cover that.

Reply to
Brent

but frod spec every minute detail. or at least, they should. and they should test what they're sent too.

well, unless this is a deliberate design spec with a deliberate result, these are all consistently out of spec because the manufacture is bad.

or maybe there's something going on behind the scenes. maybe the chinese have been pushing for more control, and sending out deliberately defective product is their way of forcing frod/getrag to hand it over.

Reply to
jim beam

Yes, which leads me to believe that a fair amount of users doing something the testing does not catch.

Bad manufacturing is rarely consistent. It's all over the place and out of control. These users have had multiple transmissions fail the same way (if we can take the forum posts to be truthful) Bad manufacturing is not that consistent. Good manufacturing that is demanded to hit an unrealistic target or has a process that isn't right can make the same out of spec part consistently to the same out of spec dimension. Ford should have caught this condition some time ago.

The hardest problems to solve are the ones where the users are doing something that testing doesn't catch. The way the failures are described, the way people discuss Ford FSEs examining their cars, etc and so is telling me Ford has already looked for out of spec parts and poor assembly. They are in the stage of trying to figure out what people are doing and how to fix it. Different people are reporting different solutions from the FSE's. Ford is also apparently paying attention to what the aftermarket Mustang parts suppliers are doing.

If this were a case of poor manufacturing there should be by now a TSB that specifically says what part(s) to look at and replace. They don't have one. That's what's really angering people. No solution.

By proving they can't handle it?

The thing that would concern me is bad bearings. But Getrag should be using SKF or another sound bearing supplier (they all have facilities in China these days), rather than the stuff from the chinese bearing brands. I also would fear production line/buyer substitutions of things like bearings. However the first engineer to look at a returned transmission should notice the good bearings have been substituted with cheapo ones. A TSB would be issued to replace the entire trans or to replace the bearings. (same with any other part) this hasn't happened. So what's wrong? It's got to be a complex relationship that is variable. Provided there isn't some huge cover up going on that's just making people more angry something must be happening that some drivers do that ford doesn't do in their testing.

Reply to
Brent

No, I was agreeing with your point. But it's important for manufacturers to know how the customer uses their product, and that's why we have procedures like beta-testing with selected known-abusive customers...

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

i have a hard time with that. earlier, you raised the very valid point about something not being on the radar screen of a new batch of testers or engineers without prior experience, but that is a stretch in this case.

you're talking dimensional, not material. poor material is very consistent.

we agree.

no, by manipulating output to force frod/getrag's hand. chinese engineers are not stupid - indeed, they're usually very well qualified, very smart, and in order to get in to one of their universities, loyal to the party.

but fakes are super-abundant there. it may say skf on the box, it may say skf on the casing, but it's old baked bean tins inside.

one thing i've seen that seems to bamboozle even well qualified engineers, is sticking clutch plates. if the splines on the input shaft are rolled not cut, and the rolled teeth are too fine, they can bind, abrade, and generally get stuck on the shaft. thus, when the clutch is released, it doesn't properly float, and the resulting continued torque application f's up the ability of the synchros to work, and indeed wears them out in short order. given the "clutch plate bolt" chatter, the synchro chatter and the selector fork chatter, that's where i'd look.

Reply to
jim beam

That's a mixture of different things that you've just put together that makes something entirely different. What I wrote immediately above is a short version of what I had written previously. See the story of a product I designed that I posted in another branch. That's what I am getting at.

BTW: I just read a post where a mustang owner figured out something he was doing while shifting caused 2nd gear lock outs. He learned what to do to avoid it and how to reproduce it on demand.

Material is created by processes as well. out of control process are all over the place. To get material that is sub par the same way every time indicates a controlled process that is out of wack. It doesn't seem wide spread enough to be material. After this hit the mainstream news, which should bring lots of people out of the woodwork, the reports on the government website greatly increased but are still a pretty small number compared to production. Huge compared to typical government reports though.

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gives a total, unless I made an error, of 21,852 MT82 mustangs for 2011 only. It appears that less than 200 (provided no repeats) people (a serious problem for modern manufacturing) for 2011-2012 combined have complained on forums and the government. If the real amount is 5 times that, we are looking at an -unacceptable- rate of less than 5%. Something -is- wrong, but it's not a every single one type of wrong.

Force ford to use the GT500 trans in the GT? It would be atypical of Ford historically to give in to such nonsense.

Manufacturers buy direct and through approved distributors. You or me could get a fake, not Getrag.

Sounds reasonable. A cut spline should have sharper geometery. Some have suspected clutch release. One race shop has put out a new line to the slave that has less restriction in the fittings. Some report this helps. But I would think the resulting damage on the input splines would be seen, but that's only if someone looks there, upstream of the immediate failure.

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Reply to
Brent

I'm behind the curve, what transmission is this? I thought that 'stangs used Tremec transmissions, I guess that is not the case anymore? Is this a new design, or a Tremec design outsourced to the Chinese?

nate

Reply to
N8N

And in a nutshell, that's why the Corvair failed. It was sporty but couldn't handle being driven in a sporting manner.

Some lessons need to be relearned every few decades it seems.

nate

Reply to
N8N

Could also be that your average driver can't drive a stick worth a shit, including many Mustang owners. What you and I would consider "abusive" driving but within the parameters of expected use (e.g. full- throttle powershifting, consistent shifting without the clutch but rev- matching) might actually be less abusive than the hamfistedness that occurs when an unskilled driver tries to drive it. So you might hand a prototype to a test driver with instructions to abuse the crap out of the car and he'll start hot-lapping and drag racing it, but might not think to deliberately set up a situation where gears are grinding, ride the clutch, etc. etc. etc.

I'm not saying that that's what's happening in Ford's case, just that it is possible.

nate

Reply to
N8N

meh, I like it. I like the '69 too.

I'm just afraid of what's going to happen when the introduce the retro Mustang II, complete with vinyl landau roof.

nate

Reply to
N8N

Getrag 6spd manual. Ford is using it with the new engines in 2011 and

2012 models.
Reply to
Brent

I've thought the same thing given what I've been reading. I just don't want to say it given how sensitive people are. Those that have mentioned it in the forums get attacked. Some of the stories told lend to that theory as well.

Reply to
Brent

It might also be that you have a lot reports of drivers experiencing problems because there's a higher than average number of users. OTOH, a

6 speed transmission seems like a delicate piece of machinery.
Reply to
dsi1

Believe it or not, it's a Getrag fabbed in China.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

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