legacycentral bbs

How har is it t rebuild a automatic transmission. i picked up a shell and it's got a bad auto tranny in it and i'd like to rebuild it if it's not going to hurt my pockets and try to get some of my money back.

i don't know what's wrong with it at all so im kinda goin out on a limb here.

if it's not worth it i'll have some turbo a/t drivetrain parts for sale soon...

Just incase anyone has thought to searching, i did search... all i found were some unanswered questions

SemperGuard wrote: Though considering it's probably 150 ish for a set of clutches for both new and you can probably get an aftermarket full rebuild kit for like 200-250 it'd probably be more worthwhile to go that route and replace all the clutches you go through to get to the low & rev brake.

BTW rebuilding an auto is HELLA easy. People just make it out to be hard because they don't undestand it and think that all the moving parts are like rocket science or something.

According to him ^ it's easy. Personally I'd just grab a junkyard tranny+rear diff for around $100 (all 3 pull-a-parts in the area have subarus). You don't know their condition, sure, but since you haven't rebuilt one before how confident are you that yours'll last? The tranny is one major thing I entrust to the pro's.

I don't know if I'd go as far as saying it's easy.....but you need to know what you're doing. Especially on the valve body. There's a lot of little stuff there that if you don't know where it goes, you'll have problems.

you also need a trained eye to identify excessive wear on parts such as the basket and sprags and stuff. if you could find a really good manual on the subject I might try it or if you had someone with you who knew their stuff would be good too.

Derek spends more time cleaning everything than actually assembling transmissions. When they get to him they are usually pretty torn up, and there are metal and clutch bits everywhere.

Being that he does it everyday, his ability to diagnose issues with auto trannies far excedes that of anyone else I've met in the car world. Not saying I wouldn't try it if I had a detailed manual.

Cost depends on the condition of the trans. My sister's auto for her '95 was about $650 in parts, not including fluid. A seal kit, half of the pump, a torque converter, forward clutch, transfer clutch, some other stuff that I can't remember, and it adds up.

Keep in mind that you will never get a torque converter clean of garbage that has found its way in there from the transmission tearing up. Tranny shops use a $5k machine to simply clean out the cooler in the radiator.


Search for "whitelegacyguy" on photobucket and he has a couple albums of assembling phase 1 transmissions. One is his, and the other is the full drag tranny for a friend of ours.