Junkyard transmission advice

Be sure the junkyard has some sort of a guarantee on the transmission. If not, check another junkyard. cuhulin

Look for a car with a lot of side body damage but low mileage on the odometer, and pull it out of that one.

Side damage is less apt to crack the transmission case, I think, and your overall chances are good.

If the vehicle doesn't have body damage, stay away from it. If it wasn't in a wreck, they likely scrapped it because the engine or transmission is bad.

--scott

Check out

see if car-part.com list any junkyards in your area. cuhulin

I think you should research this a little more. Some of the Caravans (and I dont remember which years) had a bad reputation for early transmission failures. Maybe a reputable tranny repair shop could give you some guidance on which models are to be avoided.

That 604, ultradrive, or whatever you want to call it kept a lot of trannie shops in business. Anybody that had one of those mini vans for any length of time without a trannie failure should go buy a lotto ticket. 30K to 50K seemed to be what a rebuild lasted.

unless its wrecked, most of the vans in the boneyard are probably there for bad trannies.

About the only thing you can do is look for a clean trannie with a rebuild tag on it and roll the dice. Hopefully, out of a wrecked car. If the body is intact, its death by motor or death by tranie most of the time.

bob

Any other model that might drop in place there? Were any of these ever sold with manuals?

--scott

bob

Wow I guess we were lucky then because this thing has 180,000 miles on it! :-) I see rebuild kits arent that expensive for these things. If I got a used transmission from a junkyard how impossible for a home mechanic is it to fix it up assuming one has room to lay parts out across an entire empty garage and take their time? I`ve seen photos of the inside of transmissions and it looks like a nightmare. I`m not in a big hurry to get this thing on the road but need to basically do it for as little as possible.

Wow I guess we were lucky then because this thing has 180,000 miles on it! :-) I see rebuild kits arent that expensive for these things. If I got a used transmission from a junkyard how impossible for a home mechanic is it to fix it up assuming one has room to lay parts out across an entire empty garage and take their time? I`ve seen photos of the inside of transmissions and it looks like a nightmare. I`m not in a big hurry to get this thing on the road but need to basically do it for as little as possible.

*********** Nothing is impossible, but overhauling an automatic transmission is a daunting job for a novice. I guess it depends upon the person to some extent. Some special tools are very helpful, but maybe not absolutely necessary. (Yes, I am signaling strongly that you might not want to take this on.)

The rebuild kits are not so expensive. There may be hard parts that are damaged that are not included in the kits.

Anyone with any mechanical ability can rebuild a manual transmission. It's not all that difficult, and there are only a fairly small number of things that you need to measure. Stuff like bearings you just replace rather than even bother measuring them because there aren't a lot and they aren't that expensive.

Manual transaxles from front-wheel drive cars are a little more difficult to work on, but the real hard part is getting them in and out without a lift. It's not that much worse than working on a standard rear wheel drive transmission.

But automatic transmissions are full of fiddly stuff. Not just lots of mechanical stuff, but lots of hydraulic stuff. Hundreds of springs to replace. Clutches to replace. Sleeves to replace. Lots of stuff that needs to be carefully measured and then replaced if it's out of tolerance. Lots of stuff that needs to be torqued down very accurately. Lots of stuff that you can do wrong if you aren't working in a perfectly clean environment or are just a little distracted.

Hardly anybody other than specialists will work on these things, and in fact because of the amount of fiddly stuff, it's usually cheaper just to drop the thing and send it to a specialist and let them do the work, even ignoring the risk that someone else will forget a shim somewhere and have to drop the transmission and disassemble it again.

The moral of this story, incidentally, is that if you don't have a lot of money and you want to drive a car for a long, long time, get a manual transmission. Yes, you'll have to replace the clutch someday but that's a lot cheaper than a rebuild.

--scott

Disclaimer: my personal experience here is limited to only one backyard rebuild of a 5-speed Getrag and two rebuilds of a badly-designed Chrysler transaxle from a Laser.

If that is an automatic shift transmission, in my opinion, I think it would be better for you to look for a good junkyard transmission.

I have never rebuilt any kind of a transmission before.If that is a rear wheel drive vehicle with a manual shift transmission, replacing the clutch parts (new or rebuilt clutch disk, pressure plate, and throw out fork bearing) is relativly easy.I have done a few clutch jobs before.You would need a clutch disk line up tool you can buy cheap enough at most auto parts stores.

Manual shift transmissions are better than automatic shift transmissions, if you don't mind manually shifting gears. cuhulin

Look at the tranny fluid, and smell it, if it's brown instead of red; Or, if it doesn't smell right. It's burned, and you're probably buying a bad clutch pack.