The Ironic Mistake
Well Hello There Fellow Technicians And Hivers!
It's one of those days, those days that I had the privilege of being able to say "Now I've seen it all."
It's not the breaking of the part that got me it's the fact that of where it broke, how far they sent the transmission away to get it fixed and the fact that they weren't able to sort it out themselves. It's not a problem we do exchange a lot of work between our two shops so I suppose doing a freebie for them would only encourage them to send more work our way!
So all in all it's worth it, for us at-least since we didn't pay the couriers fee.
So what happened was they removed this automatic transmission which comes out of a Ford Ranger to replace the rear main seal on the engine. This was done at the dealership in a smaller town roughly 215 kilometers away from us. A Ford serviced at a Ford dealership, that's ironic ey? And They messed up real bad with something that is suppose to be common knowledge when working on vehicles.
Upon the re-fitment of the transmission one has to be sure that the torque converter is inserted properly after tightening the bolts of the bell-housing. What I like to do is after I bolted it into place I feel if the torque converter is able to spin freely or not, if it doesn't spin freely... well then you have to remove it again because you're going to break the pump, this is exactly what happened here.
The pump is located on the front of the transmission but also inside the transmission, the torque converter presses over it and then seals the unit from leaking out. The torque converter spins with the motor and forces oil through the pump, the pump then supplies oil through out the transmission, so when the pump breaks the transmission has no oil pressure which means the vehicle wont move at all.
Before we can remove the pump we have to remove the valve-body of the transmission, well it's already removed in the picture (If you look closely behind the transmission it's standing in the corner, but I'll add a photo of it later on.)
Now I assume they sent it to us because this in it self is actually a delicate job to do and most people have no wits about them when it comes to valve-bodies and automatic transmissions... Probably better that they sent it to us, on top of that it's a very messy job.
After unbolting the pump on the front of the transmission I got my fancy smancy puller bought just for this job, it's been quite sometime since I last had to use this little amazing tool, well it's just a puller but the amazing thing about it is how easy it makes the job!
Here we go, the thing that makes the wheels go round and round, well at-least the start of that process!
I am keen on seeing how these things break when they do in-fact break. I've yet to break one myself and I can remember when I started doing transmission work it was always a big fear of mine, but now that I know what must happen it's not even something that drifts in my mind any more...
With that said, one day is one day and it would most likely be on a job that we don't have any spares lying around for. 🤣
The pump consists of a lot of parts that are fitted into each other with ALOT of veins running through the whole system, now luckily for this guy only the one gear broke and it didn't hurt any of the other parts in the pump system.
Okay, okay... This didn't break quite like I thought it would... I'm surprised, I thought it would be a total mash up of metals that grinded into each other...
It just cracked, although that crack is the cause for the major loss of pressure within the transmission.
This is very interesting indeed!
The pump has been re-assembled with a gear that isn't broken, we didn't fit a brand new gear since we are doing the job as a favour for the dealer. But I can press that in and have the job out of our lives for good!
I mentioned earlier that I'll be sharing a photo of how the valve-body looks, well here it is.
One can and might be able to say that this is the heart of everything that goes on in the transmission, if anything happens inside the transmission it was because of a piston shift in this block of veins, even the tiniest shift can cause a change in oil pressure which opens a different channel and then selects a different gear. Very complicated little thing I am holding here!
Dated 11/05/2023
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Good job, i have to say. 👍
For this and many other reasons. I'm inclined to manual transmission, I don't trust these robots :)
!CTP
beautiful post I have always liked what you publish.
This one impresses me, you are totally right that a small change can either make everything much better or much worse. Thanks for posting
Thanks a lot bud.
Yeah the problem is sometimes those small changes don't really get noticed straight away so one has to be very careful 😂😂