Ugh. I just replaced the transmission in my 97 Lincoln Continental (which actually sits in the back seat of a Ford Escort) with a 98 Continental junkyard find, and it is behaving as shown in this video:
That is, that it makes line pressure and works seemingly as it should for a minute or so, and then it makes a noise kinda like a nitro powered expresso machine and the line pressure sinks to zero, and tranny doesn’t put power down at all. The original transmission was not shifting into any gear but second, and after brute force testing it, diagnosed it as cooked clutches. A local junkyard hooked me up with another tranny from a '98 Continental, replacing the '97 Continental tranny that was in there.
I pulled the cover off both tranny’s, and the old tranny actually looked like it had much less crusty parts, the junkyard one had a bunch of rusty goo in everything, it had been sitting for 6 years, I was told. I swapped the plates and torque converter from the '97 to the '98, noting they looked exactly the same and bolted right up. When I dropped the pan on the '98 there was a fair amount of sludge and… a candy wrapper. That was weird. Anyway, cleaned the pan, replaced the filter, filled with fluid, and here’s what I’ve got.
Oh, and the pressure control solenoid can be ruled out as I have copmpletely disonnected the ECU and it does the exact same thing.