legacycentral bbs

Story goes me and a couple friends took my 211k auto out of my 93ss and put one with 58k from another tleg. Took a few days and some waiting on parts/learning the proper way to seat a torque converter(biggest pita)!

Parts installed with swap:
Rear main seal(set in flush)
Metal oil separator plate(bolted and rtd'd)
Input shaft seal(we set it in flush with surface)
Interior tranny filter and new drain pan gasket
All fluid drain/refills(trans, oil, front diff)

Once we finally got everything back together it shifted smooth and perfect! The car felt alive again. There were only two problems I noticed right off the bat.

1. When shifting into reverse or first gear or even downshifting(pretty much any heavy load on the tranny) I'd feel a shudder/extremely loud creak under the passenger floorboard side. Like the tranny wanting to break free or hit the chassis of the car where its mounted.

Josh and a couple others have suggested its the trans rear mount, I'm swapping my old ones in since it never did it before and will report back if this fixes it! I will also make sure everything else is still tight.

2. This is the more serious one that is mind boggling me!! I have always had minor leaks/seaps before the swap, usually oil from rear main going out and the plate on back of block passenger side... Since the swap and rear main seal/plate install I haven't noticed any oil drips, BUT atf has been dripping like a mofo. At first it was only a drip a minute coming off the jock cup looking bracket bolted to the front crossmember/behind oil pan. I figured it was prolly just overflow breathing out the hoses or ps seepage....
Well now its dripping from 3-6 diff spots including down the front diff, the crossmember, the metal ps lines, etc. Also at the rate of a few drops a minute, quite noticeable over night and who knows how much drips while driving this is the mind boggling part, my ps and tranny fluid are all perfect, each day I've checked them, always perfectly full/maybe a little over. I've read the trans atf fluid correctly following guidelines I've read on bbs AND cold way. Sooo I'm wondering if this is ps just seeping because I need to replace the hoses that have prolly never been in 200k or is it more serious that trans atf is slowly seeping from inside the bell housing from a possible seal or messup I had a car nightmare where I thought the input shaft seal wasn't supposed to be installed all the way flush) don't know why.. hopefully its not leaking from there inside

Symptoms I've noticed from the last week(as I've seen more atf drop) the trans acting up:
-slipping into 3rd when in D or shifting the gears manually.
-put into D and start to drive nice and easy and it wont shift up...just keeps climbing rpm until it reaches 4-5k and just slip hard till I let off
-trans shifting not as crisp/sloppy delay

The above reasons are why I'm thinking the trans is leaking but again like I said, all levels are fine! Any suggestions please throw em out, I've recently switched jobs so in between working a lot of hours that prohibit me getting underneath for a better look.

I'm thinking of adding half qt or so to the trans to see if that helps. I mean it shifted way better right after we swapped it in and that was two weeks ago ish of drips as I've mentioned.

3. Now this third problem arised roughly a week and a half after we swapped, I was checking fluids and noticed the front diff dip stick dry! We put in 1.2 qts or whatever the fsm called for when we did the swap and reused the crush washer for the drain bolt, it must've slowly dripped out and I caught it at the right time so I filled it back up and going to install the new oem crush washer on Monday, I'm constantly checking that fluid as well and it is still full! Idk if that running dry though has had any effect on my trans acting up or if it didn't at all and I saved it... Hopefully the latter

Sorry this post is so long but I wanted to include as much information as possible.

Welp,a lil more diag, I noticed after work the tranny was really getting sloppy so went with my gut and went to Walmart for some atf and lucas atf stabilizer. Put a lil over a qt in(I noticed it was about a qt low, even though I've been checking multiple times a day that were showing the level full) anywho its shifting much better but this goes to show that my tranny is def leaking from inside the bell housing, guessing from that input shaft seal I was thinking, any ideas? I def wanna fix this problem before I ruin a perfectly good tranny

Hi,
Does sound like a leak on the front. Go over to the USMB site and do some searching/ask about it. I've seen more info on the 4EAT there than here.

GL,
TD

You said the front diff fluid leaked as well. I wonder if the seal that keeps the front diff & ATF separate is bad.

Josh where exactly would that seal be located?

I'm gonna be looking at it in detail today and ill report back... I may actually just end up doing a manual swap or entire ej20g Drivetrain swap here in the near future and end up building this block that would be coming out.

Sorry for the delay in replying. That seal is in between the trans & front diff. The auto trans's have an integrated diff & trans section, so they look like one piece. It's actually two. So to fix that seal would require disassembly of at least the front part of the trans.

Well the leaking has subsided pretty much... I think it was overfilled because its shifting normally now, still feels sluggish but I do have my boost turned down cuz my mbc is acting up. Anyways ill be swapping in a 5sp and another ej22t in here within the next month hopefully and have this setup for sale or to build