Blown Reverse??

jeepster · June 12, 2006

Whee! I can join the club. 122K miles on the Tahoe Z71. Coming home from towing my car 1.5 hrs, put it into reverse to back the trailer up... revs, but nothing else.

Looks like my 4L60E is probably another one that has a blown sun gear. This truck not only has provided great service in the past (towing the car 8 x a year, 1500-3000 miles per event), and my wife just get a new horse, so there's occasional towing there now too.

And we want, nay, need it to continue providing service.

So... going to contact our tranny guy after I hopefully have a few reponses to some questions...

1) What should I keep OEM inside and what should I 'upgrade'? An earlier post mentioned something regarding using a Corvette servo... better shifting capabilities, especially on the downshift. Would this be a good thing to have for towing?

2) Would there be a benefit to adding a good tranny cooler? Would that help alleviate the fatique from towing? (I feel this is rhetorical, but want to ask anyways)

3) What should I have our guy look for inside once he breaks it apart. While writing this, I don't how familiar he is with these trannies.

4) Should we just get a GM unit and swap out the current case? Warranty for 3 years/100K miles.

And here's the sad part (lesson learned after reading some posts doing research) We just had the tranny 'serviced' at a GM dealer less than a month ago and have put close to 1500 miles on it since. I didn't even know that a tranny flush might be the culprit. Need to look up the paperwork to see if they did a flush, or a drop. If they did a flush, and it's on the paperwork as a flush, can the dealer be held liable since the GM Docs (from what I've read on the forum) don't mention a flush is acceptable... that it should be dropped?

Any help is and would be appreciated. Going to wait a day before planning to have some knowledgable responses.

TIA

jeepster · June 15, 2006

Bump. Anyone?

01z71 · June 15, 2006

If it helps any when the tranny in my '98 went out (4l60E) I got the GM Remanufactured 3 year, 36,000 mile warranty. The trans. cost like $2100.00. or I could have paid $1400.00 for a 90 day warranty on a torque converter. My truck had 134,000 on it then. It's got 156,xxx on it now and I have never had one problem out of it. The warranty has since run out but no problems.

I can't help you any with what to look for inside or what to strenghten up. Like you said about the tranny cooler it would not hurt. Heat kills the tranny's. I recently heated mine up good on my '04 -- I'm sure I'll pay for it down the line.

You can try contacting the dealer and talk to them about the flush - I don't know if it will accomplish anything or not but at least you can vent some about it. The flushes seem to stir up aq bunch of stuff.

Anyway, best of luck and let us know what you do.