Stripped: E46 Automatic Transmission. Must see epicness, period.

Be patient for the pictures to load! There are 150 of them!

Thanks to flickr for being in existence, and to my friend Grant for lending a hand.

Well, it is officially done. After breaking two cheater bars, two 3/8" ratchets and cutting half of my fingers, I'm glad to say it is done. I think this thread is one of a kind on e46f, it is really amazing actually. Read the whole thread, look at the pictures, enjoy. It's set up the same as my 5 speed diy, lots of talk at the beginning but then lots of pictures with even more talk. At any rate...

It took some deliberation for me to go through with this task. Of course taking things apart is really easy but I wanted to do it properly and not have a guilty conscience afterwards. It took 2 days of work and I actually spent $23 on you guys

To business:

For the record: Transmission has 130k miles on it. I will talk about the wear later.

I started by cleaning the transmission with buckets of degreaser and then put it in a penetrating oil bath overnight. This helped a little, but not much as I soon discovered. Afterwards, I needed to drain the transmission fluid. Easy enough right? Yeah no... It's easy when the transmission is suspended in the air when it's attached to your car, but that 100lb hunk of crap was sitting on my garage floor, how to drain.... hmmm

I ended up using a jack and jacking it up and then just setting it down on my catch pan, then unscrewed the drain plug. It kinda worked, and I thought I drained all of the fluid... noooo. I took the torque converter out and set it aside (I still have no idea how to open it, it's completely sealed). Set a large bamboo mat on my garage floor and got to work. I knew I had to take the bell housing bolts off first and then the output shaft collar nut. Took off the bell housing bolts and got to the collar nut... oh boy.

Even with the penetrating oil, that thing would NOT budge. I didn't even have an impact so this made things 10x harder. I broke two 3/8" ratchet and 2 cheater bars trying to get that nut off. I ended up going to sears and picking up a 1/2" ratchet ($23) and getting my 30mm socket. Hammered it on and just started beating at the rachet with a rubber mallet. It finally broke loose and I was able to move on.

After I got the collar nut loose, I could then take the output shaft off, which revealed the inside of the transmission for the first time! It looked pretty damn cool to say the least. Now to take the bell housing off. As you can see later in the pictures, the bell housing looks and seems like it should come right off, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldnt take it off without cheating a little. I grabbed a crowbar and just pried at the thing, well it eventually came loose... I soon realized that I probably should have taken off the pan first. I ended up breaking what looks like the oil filter return? Haha, no worries, it's not like it matters.

Once I took apart the bell housing, it revealed the coolest sh!t I've seen in my life. So many clutches, gears, disk after disk of engineering marvel. It was pretty damn amazing. I took as many pictures as I could to show you guys what it really looked like, hope the d60 finally was put to good diy use!

After the bell housing came out it was smooth sailing, Seth talked of a special tool that I needed to take out the clutch packs, hmm I dunno, I did fine without one. There were a lot of random slip rings holding in the clutches, even the most massive slip ring I've ever seen. It was a pain to get out but it was needed in order to get to the main clutch packs. No regular circlip/slip ring pliers could get this thing out, it was literally a foot in diameter. Once that was out, it was all downhill, just took clutch pack after clutch pack out of the transmission and then moved on to the pan. Took out the valve body and I was nearly done. I have included pictures of the infamous reverse solenoid that goes bad and what part of it clogs up apparently. I will label the pictures accordingly.

From here on out it's mostly just pictures, enjoy and if you have any questions, just reply here, I'll be glad to answer them. There are about 150 pictures at *medium now* resolution so be glad if the page even loads, lulz. If you guys want full resolution images, friend request me on flickr or just send me a pm on here.

I'm throwing up a copyright notice on this material only because I don't want these pictures copied elsewhere. This is exclusive to fanatics and it is already hogging enough bandwidth. If you want to throw up a link to this thread on another forum, go ahead, but the pictures and this material stays here (in this thread).

*ATTENTION*
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Again, this material is protected by copyright laws. You simply cannot take these pictures and post them on your own accord. If I see these pictures posted elsewhere I will file a copyright infringement against you. This has happened twice already and it has not ended well. I'm doing this because flickr community guidelines call for a specific way of linking pictures (notice how you can actually click on the pictures and where it takes you) and because these are my pictures put up for your enjoyment and knowledge. I know most of you will understand and respect this but there are some people that merely don't care or don't understand what a copyright means.
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First look at the gear drums













The orange teeth are part of the multiple clutch disks



Barely any scoring marks. Very clean gears





Copyright © 2009 Neil Prasad. All Rights Reserved.

Reason why it sucks











These springs were under sooo much pressure it was insane.



First clutch disks removed























I accidentally the oil filter





Copyright © 2009 Neil Prasad. All Rights Reserved.

Taking out the massive slip rings





Is it true? I shall talk about it later...



Starting to take the pan off because I had no idea how to take the rest of the gears out







Valve body



Oil filter, nasty looking





Wiring harness, I found that ATF + plastic connectors = really brittle plastic





Reverse solenoid that goes bad. I'll talk about it later on



Oil filter that completely broke down



Harness out



Close up connector



lovely valve body





Shifting lever



Oil passageway plugs, these held in the gears I couldnt get out



Valve body top side



Unbolted, absolute maze of oil passageways





Reverse solenoid again



Finally dropped the gears out of the housing



It sorta looks like a beer keg, haha







Disassembling





I will talk about gear wear later















The planetary gear system, absolutely amazing engineering





Copyright © 2009 Neil Prasad. All Rights Reserved.

Digging into the valve body again



Those airsoft pellet looking things were inside...





Got bored and decided to re-assemble the tranny outside of the casing





Reverse solenoid, closer look. The green screen I took off is the screen that gets clogged, maybe. lulz. For more information if you are having a no reverse problem on your GM automatic transmission, visit this thread: It talks about what happens to this reverse solenoid and how to fix the problem.

http://forum.e46fanatics.com/showthread.php?t=706809















Stripped



We ended up rebuilding the transmission but I think we forgot a few bearings



I think these were the special tools Seth talked about, I happened to find them on my workbench... haha



All bolted back, minus the pan. No way I could rebuild that valve body, nope.



Copyright © 2009 Neil Prasad. All Rights Reserved.

Alrighty, the pictures are done so lets talk about gear wear. Surprisingly this transmission was really clean. You guys can decide for yourselves why it was like that, but let me just say. The fluid was the stock fluid, 130k miles on it. The fluid looked horrible but the internals were very nice. You guys can decide. The only wear I could find was where there was a contact point between a bearing and a gear, not that bad though, just some minor scoring marks. You can see in all of the close up drum gear pictures I posted, there isn't much wear on the gears. You can still see the machining marks on most of the teeth... pretty amazing after 130k miles on stock fluid if you ask me.

My take on fluid changes?

I'm sticking to the same thing I've said in the past, don't touch automatic transmission fluid until 100k for two reasons: the fluid viscosity obviously held up until now, and there isn't much wear at all on the internals to this point. One thing I failed to mention is that the oil filter was absolute crap. It was rock hard and clogged with loads of oil impurities. My advice is this: if you want to pep up your transmission for reasons unknown to me, just change the filter and be done with it. But keep in mind, in order to change the filter you must drop the pan, and in doing so you will have to drain some of the fluid. This is why I've always said do the simple drain and fill method, not a full flush. The fluid seemed fine to me, not a lot of grit or grime in it. But if you wish to change it, I hope people hold the "lifetime fluid" to be somewhat truth. It seemed to hold it's properties to this point, so if I were you, I'd at least leave it till 100k miles. People changing auto fluid at 60k miles is just a waste.

Also, I thought I wrote this somewhere but I guess I didn't. The reason this transmission failed is because it had a bad reverse solenoid and the torque converter was in partial lockup. That's the reason I did a manual swap and that's the reason I took it apart. I didn't really care for the extra $100 I could have gotten at a junkyard and I definitely didn't care to rebuild it and sell it to a fanatic.

Take it for what it is. The people here who know me, know that I don't waste my time doing these things.

The End.
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***If you guys like my threads, rate them accordingly. Some people, and I'm guessing it's the user Blocked Out, go around and just give my threads 1 star ratings for no reason and it's kinda lame. I know it's not a big deal but hey, threads like these don't come along often so if you want, a nice rating would be really cool***
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SICKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK

is it me or is ur tranny pretty clean?

btw first

Woah, very cool!

omg so sick

Fvck the 56kb/s unfriendly, this thread is T3 unfriendly

Very nice though, the inner workings of the valve body looks so interesting

looks like your million dollar tripod came in handy

i would put make some of those gears into art for my house

awesome....now clean the parts and make a coffee table out of them or a stool.

very nice work neil

wow nice....now put everything back together lol

there is a special tool to remove those springs. It's still a pain in the ass even with it.

why do you think there is a filter and the magnet in the pan. What did the bands and servo's look like?

the clutches and pressure plates look to be fine

Thanks to everyone, after you load the page a couple of times it's not so bad. Just gotta get the pictures loaded in your cache.

Originally Posted by bumere46

wow nice....now put everything back together lol

I already did, haha. Last couple pictures show it.

Honestly it wasnt all that bad. If I had documented and remembered where everything went, I probably could have put it back together 100% not 90% like I did.

Enjoy guys, I'm going to go eat.

didnt know it was mande by GM, but not surprised.

awesome! nice to know the ATF works after that many miles...

cool, nice detail

Very nice. Maybe I missed this, but why waste the tranny though?

Originally Posted by snikwad

didnt know it was mande by GM, but not surprised.

Ready for the bombshell? The GM one is the good one. The E46 autos are made by two different companies, ZF and GM. The early ZF ones are the ones with problems.