I bought this pickup at an auction. There are three things happening with the transmission. 1. First gear doesn’t like to shift into second. One of those things where if you take your foot off the gas at certain RPMs it’ll cooperate. 2. As it’s on second gear, waiting shift to third (accelerating to get on a freeway or whatever) it starts to shudder. Doesn’t feel like the engine, it feels like it’s in the transmission, but i could be wrong. 3. When I have overdrive on, it’ll go into that 4th gear but with any change in throttle or going up a hill, it seems to slip in and out.
So basically, is my transmission screwed or is there some sort of pressure sensor or some other thing that might be easier than having to get a new one?
If this is a early-mid 90’s model with the 351W, and the truck has more than 150k miles on it, plan on a rebuild in the near future. The earlier iterations of the E4OD used in these trucks wasn’t the greatest. IIRC it saw revisions in 1993, 1995, and again in 1998. The pre-95 models had problems with torque converter shudder, and unless they had the fluid changed religiously every 30k miles, rebuilds at around 150k miles were not uncommon. Also there were two versions of the E4OD. The light duty one was used behind the 300, 302, and 351W. The heavy duty variant was used behind the 460 and Power Strokes. The HD variants tended to hold up better. The light duty E4OD behind the 351W was the most trouble-prone combination.
Is your engine performing normally? Any loss of engine power increases your throttle opening and drops your vacuum and make the transmission act like that. I had a minivan that I thought had 100,000 mile plugs and it only had 50,000 plugs and it acted like that, at first on hills and then started doing it all the time. New plugs cured my transmission.
Having said all that, that would not explain what sounds like torque converter shudder.
It seems like the 8th cylinder isn’t firing, so I’ll replace the coil for that. It’s a 2004 and apparently they have individual coils for each cylinder. I hate new(ish) cars.
