First, a big thanks for the forums and articles at this site. I was able to find the problem with my 5r55e transmission. It had the common issue, separater plate gasket blown. I also found a link here to one of your advertisers that sold me an oem valve body and solenoids at a nice price.

I calibrated a three gallon bucket to measure fluid removed so I knew I had drained eight quarts out of the tranny and cooler. I added that much and started flushing. Put in just over twelve quarts and everything looks pretty and clean, seems like I got a pretty good flush.

I did adjust the externally adjustable band and found that a bit odd. The recommendation was to torque the band down and then back off two turns. The band was already tightened to about one and a quarter turns back-off. Should I leave it at two turns or set it back like it was?

Not much information on this truck, it has about 140,000 miles on it but I think we have only put about 30,000 of that on it and no idea about maintenance prior to purchase. The fluid was dark but didn't smell burnt. There was a magnet in the pan, probably indicates it has been serviced at least once. There were no chips or shavings of any size in the pan or attached to the magnet, just a magnetic sludge, maybe from metallic clutch disks and bands or backing plates?

Flushing the transmission was one place the site was very handy, I would have assumed the vacuum side of the system would have sucked up the fluid just fine. After reading that this didn't work I refilled through the filler tube. One note on this 2002 Ranger, again I don't know if this was dealer added or factory cooler, both lines went in the bottom of the cooler. I assumed that the right side line which would have been the top line if the cooler was rotated 90 degrees would be the line into the cooler. For whatever reason it wasn't on this truck.

One other note: I printed out a photograph of the bottom of the valve body as recommended but glued it to an inch thick piece of the pink plastic insulating foam I had laying around. I used a pencil to give me tapered holes to start the valve body bolts into and it worked great. I turned the bolts into and back out of the plastic and had absolutely no problems with bits of loose foam getting in the bolt threads which had been a minor concern.

Thanks to this site the job went smoothly with no fuss or muss although I was very short on tools and equipment to work with and a wee bit rusty working on transmissions. The last time I did more than change fluid and filter on a transmission was sometime in the mid-eighties!

Hu