Herbold Racing!

The past three days were made up of a lot of sweat and grime for me. My garage floor is now covered in this greasy slick film. What have I been up to? Well, I’ve been working on changing out the existing oil pan to the new TCI deep tranny pan. My reason for doing that in the first place is because the existing tranny pan was leaking through the gasket in several places… so I figured why not just get an all new pan.

As usual I employed the help of the good people over at the MopowerStyle forums. Here is the relevant thread:

http://www.mopowerstyle.com/forums/showthread.php?t=89031

I’ve learned a lot through this whole process. It’s taken me three days mainly because of lack of experience. And the friends at MopowerStyle pointed out a few things to me. The pan that was on the car was already a deep pan. I did some research and found out that yes, it is a Direct Connection Deep Pan (straight from Mopar) that holds 2 quarts over stock. The TCI pan that I put on holds 4 quarts over stock so it is a little better. I also went to a Dodge dealer and got the better Mopar Performance tranny pan gasket - the kind that feels like stiff plastic as opposed to the regular flimsy foldable cork kind. The better gasket is reusable and holds up better than the cork type gasket.

Also pointed out to me by these folks is that I have a turbo action reverse manual valve body.

I’m going to go through the process of what I did to the best of my memory. The first thing I did was to open up the pan drain plug and let all the tranny fluid drain out. The fluid that drained out had a very bright and clear red color. After all the fluid drained out, I dropped the pan by removing all the pan bolts. One of the things I found inside the pan surprised me - a couple of washers! There was also very tiny bits of debris (mostly dead bug parts) and one very large dead bug. I’m pretty sure that this bug traveled to Arizona all the way from Illinois with the car.

At this time I took the chance to take a lot of pictures of the pan and the inside of the transmission. I also took off the existing filter and spacer. At the time I did not know that this pan was not stock - I assumed that the spacer that was there was stock. And because the TCI kit came with some really long bolts for the filter, I assumed that the spacer that came with the TCI kit was supposed to go below the spacer that was on the tranny. I installed the two spacers onto the transmission and then installed the new aluminum pan on the transmission, going as far as torquing up the pan bolts to the proper 13 foot per pound specification. I updated everybody at MopowerStyle and went to bed.

The next day, after reading all the responses on the forum I realized that the original pan was not stock, and that means the spacer that I found in there was not stock either. Pretty much everybody was also recommending that I adjust the bands while I am at this. Dave Schultz recommended that I get a inch per pound torque wrench so I can adjust the bands, and he also suggested that I head down to the Dodge dealer to get that nice pan gasket. After getting all that, I went to work on the tranny pan again. I dropped the pan by removing the bolts, and then took off my ridiculous double spacer and filter setup. Then I started to attempt to adjust the low/reverse band… and quickly found out that I was missing an essential tool to do this. I needed an 8 point socket because the band adjusting bolt had a square head, but all of my sockets were 6 or 12 point.

So I drove to Home Depot to find some 8 point sockets. Then I realized I had left my wallet at home so I drove back home and then back to Home Depot. I spent about half an hour looking for 8 point sockets and finally found some as part of a $80 mechanics tool kit. I got that and then went home… and by this point I was so dead tired I wanted to hit the hay.

The next morning I woke up and got to working on the car again. After some confusion I finally figured out how to adjust the low/reverse band. Turns out that doing it is quite easy… once you know how! So I finished that up and am ready to put everything back together again. I put the spacer and filter back on the tranny and tried to torque the three retaining bolts to 35 inch pounds. But the bolts that came with the TCI kit are pretty much crap - no washers and also they were ordinary pan head bolts. Torquing those up to 35 inch pounds would have destroyed the filter… so I took them out and reused the original filter bolts that were on the car - they were hex head bolts with washers and torqued up to specification without any problems.

Then I put the pan back on and tightened the pan bolts to 150 inch pounds. After that was done, I wanted to try to adjust the kickdown band. The adjusting bolt for that is on the outside of the tranny on the drivers side. But after about 15 minutes of grunting and throwing my body weight into it, I realized that the locking nut for it just did not want to come loose. So I am holding off on that adjustment for now.

I went ahead and filled up the transmission with 6 quarts of TCI Max Shift racing transmission fluid. Then I fired up the engine and let it run for about 2 minutes to get the temperature up, moved the gear selector through all gears, and rechecked the fluid level. It went down a lot so I added another 2 quarts. I tried to restart the car to check it again but the car would not start. I checked the batteries and they were low - 11.75 volts… probably not enough to turn the starter.

And that is where I am at now. I am currently charging up the two batteries and that is going to take a while. Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to try running the car again to make sure all the fluid levels are where they should be with the engine warm.

Here are the pictures:

The first few pictures are of the original pan and filter. The sixth and seventh pictures are when I thought you were supposed to stack the new spacer on the old one. There is also a picture of the Mopar deep pan sitting next to the new TCI deep pan. And then there are pictures of the various part numbers that I could find in the transmission with the pan off.