Not new to the site but have been away from it for awhile.

The trannsmission on my 1996 E350 motorhome started slipping and smoking and banging on the Geoporge Washington bridge last night after sitting in heavy traffic for 3 hours.I pulled off and it was dripping the hottest,blackest fluid from what I believe was the front seal.This fluid was nice and red and smelled perfect and was full 3 hours earlier when I gassed up to head home from the Hershey fall meet.couple of questions....

1) I need a tranny almost guaranteed so would like to know exactly what model (E40D or E40DE?)or is there some insight llearned over the years that I should apply to this now?I dont want to do this twice.

2)That front seal "one" other time puked out a little red tranny fluid when it was hot but when the truck cooled down and I topped it up it was fine for at least another two 1000 mile trips and the oil always smelled good

3)The truck is a 1996 E350 with a 30ft class C camper on it with 63k on it

4) I did sit in this ridiculous traffic jam with the overdrive "off".This didnt seem to me to be the wrong thing to do as it was never more than 5 miles an hr the whole time.All the guages were rock solid steady and the temp guage stayed well within range .The tranny clearly either lost fluid,was not being cooled or had some type of catastrophic internal failure which caused the fluid to just fry to a smoky black smelly liquid.

Need to know "why" it happened and the how to replace the tranny in the smartest way.

THANKS for any help.Jordan

 

Welcome to the site

 

It is an E4OD. There is no such thing as an E4ODE.

I can't tell why it failed without seeing what the internals look like. OD on or off makes no difference at those speeds.

 

Thanks Mark;Ive been doing my research since this happened and realize there is no E version.

Im thinking the tranny fluid was definitely about as hot as it can get after sitting in that traffic and when I got onto open rd again and put pressure back on the tranny it either blew that seal (that had leaked once before...)or the seal allowed fluid to pump past it to where what little was left did the best it could then boiled to death and failed.
I looked into Jasper trannys but didnt read much good stuff about them standing behind warranty work so am going with a Ford remanufactured unit as opposed to rebuilt.
Does this seem like a wise approach to you?. Jordan