I have an 85 6.9 that had a Borg Warner T19 that me and my dad recently swapped a ZF5 in to. We used the single mass flywheel that was on my truck. If you let the clutch out in neutral it starts making a horrible grinding noise. Same with it in gears at low rpms until about 1400rpm + (I dont have a tach so I'm guessing) . Its embarrassing to drive around because it sounds absolutely awful. Does anybody have any answers? Is the tranny itself garbage?

 

How much oil did you put in, and you used either a synthetic ATF or Synchro Shift II right?

 

I would first suspect throw out bearing.
china made products rarely last.

 

I used about 4L of ATF Dexron III. Not synthetic.

 

Throwout bearing is brand new

 

Overfill the transmission by 1 quart. So fill it up to where it comes out the fill plug, then pull the shifter off(4 screws from the top) and just pour an extra quart in there.

Lots of zf5 guys around here have done it; keeps the transmission a bit quieter with the extra noise of the SMF.


That being said... do you know the history of the ZF5? I've got a ZF5 right now in one of my rigs with a bearing that seems to be going - It makes "bearing noises" when going down the road in higher gears. It's on the input shaft side of things, too. Still, it's run for the last 6K miles this way and doesn't seem to be getting any worse, so I'm leaving it till I can rebuild it.

 

You say you used the smf from the 6.9/t19 did you get the right clutch for the zf5? The input shafts are a different size.

If over filling doesn't help it seems that a lot of people prefer sae50 motor oil as an alternative to the atf.

Like Macrob said the smf will make some noise but imho anything beats a dmf

 

DMFs still suck, I've changed about a dozen this last year on Dodges.