If there's one thing that I've always been able to smoke on any truck, it has to be the automatic transmission. In fact, I don't own a single vehicle that isn't already on its second, third, or seventh transmission. I believe that just makes every truck that I drive the ultimate test mule for true tranny testing. That being said, I was sort of amazed that the 5R110 transmission had not yet gone out on our F-350 Super Duty project, the Super Turd Diesel. Ours is a first-year 6.0L PowerStroke that has seen three times its fair share of trouble. The lemon of a truck, combined with the fact that it runs 40-inch tires with 4.56 gears, made me wonder when the transmission's luck was going to be up.
During a recent excursion to some dunes with a Polaris RZR in the bed, I noticed a considerable amount of slip on the highway as I stuck the throttle while the truck's speed held steady. The time was near.
Once certain that impending transmission doom was unavoidable, I decided to be proactive and made a call to ATS in Arvada, Colorado. Not only does it honor a five-year, 500,000-mile transmission warranty, ATS has been building heavy-duty truck transmissions in-house since the '90s, and the company's own transmission dynamometer guarantees that every transmission ATS ships out performs exactly as ordered.
While having a transmission shipped to my doorstep certainly would make life easy, I wanted a firsthand look at how our Super Duty's transmission was going together. And driving all the way out to ATS in Colorado (from California) with a transmission that was on its way out sounded risky enough to be exciting.
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1. Riding on the wings of hope and prayer, I pulled into the facilities to rebuild the F-3
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2. The wear grooves on the pump gear and pump are not supposed to be there. Those are tell
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3. See the leopard spotting on the steel plates of the clutches? That is not supposed to b