What causes the 4L60E to fail
Thread Starter
TECH Fanatic
Joined: Mar 2002
Posts: 1,390
Likes: 0
From: Chicago Land
What causes the 4L60E to fail What is destroying the automatic transmissions. Is it heat or is it just stress on parts that causes them to break. Just wondering cause if its heat then i will definately invest in a tranny cooler and a trans temp gauge.
Re: What causes the 4L60E to fail Yes.
1) Heat kills... Hotlapping an A4 is a pretty bad idea, the trans will heat up like crazy. I never race my car if the trans temp is really high like 225F. After a run my temps go from 180 to like 205F... I might get back into line but it depends on how fast it cools. I have a BM 19,000 GVW. I have seen friends hotlap when I know their tranny temps are in the 225-250F range I know it's just boiling their transmissions.
2) Torque kills... nuff said. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="gr_stretch.gif" />
3) High rpms kill them too. Shifting at 6500 is much easier on it than shifting at 7000 rpms.
1) Heat kills... Hotlapping an A4 is a pretty bad idea, the trans will heat up like crazy. I never race my car if the trans temp is really high like 225F. After a run my temps go from 180 to like 205F... I might get back into line but it depends on how fast it cools. I have a BM 19,000 GVW. I have seen friends hotlap when I know their tranny temps are in the 225-250F range I know it's just boiling their transmissions.
2) Torque kills... nuff said. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="gr_stretch.gif" />
3) High rpms kill them too. Shifting at 6500 is much easier on it than shifting at 7000 rpms.
Re: What causes the 4L60E to fail Where do you actually put the sender for the Trans temp guage? I saw something about a block that you put in line with your computer temp sender or something. Not real sure.
TECH Senior Member
Joined: Nov 2001
Posts: 9,246
Likes: 3
From: Troy, AL
Re: What causes the 4L60E to fail By far the weakest link in the 4L60-E is the 3-4 clutches which makes your 2-3 and 3-4 shifts weak. Part of the problem is that those clutches simply do not grip well. The material isn't good and there's not enough of it. We can fix that with ALTO clutches. There's 9 of the 3-4 clutches instead of 6 plus they are of a much better material. The other part of the problem is loss of pressure to the clutches at high rpm. This can also be helped by using a shift kit, better servo, 13 vane pump rotor, and a high output pump slide spring.
Now that you have the clutch failure problem fixed hard parts start to break if you have enough power to do so. There are fixes for those problems too.
Let's move this to the Drivetrain section... <img border="0" alt="[Burnout]" title="" src="graemlins/burnout.gif" />
<small>[ December 12, 2002, 01:42 PM: Message edited by: Colonel ]</small>
Now that you have the clutch failure problem fixed hard parts start to break if you have enough power to do so. There are fixes for those problems too.
Let's move this to the Drivetrain section... <img border="0" alt="[Burnout]" title="" src="graemlins/burnout.gif" />
<small>[ December 12, 2002, 01:42 PM: Message edited by: Colonel ]</small>
