I may have improperly checked my fluids, Does it HAVE to be in neutral to see if the fluids are nominal? You cannot check this if in Park position?

 

Run the thing and when you park it go through all of the gears and leave it in each one for a few seconds then put it in neutral and check the fluid level.

 

That's what I did and now it shows I am low on fluid. Went to NAPA and bought some ATF+4 and it took the whole quart, I did not think I would be this low. Now tranny is shifting much better, pretty much norm now! Thanks everyone.

FYI,

Did anyone know that this ATF+4 tranny fluid stinks to high heaven! At first, I thought I had a natural gas leak near me and had to turn off the durango to find this smell and then turn out it was the tranny fluid! Smells like rotten eggs! damn!

 

Ken, you liked the smell of ATF+4 that much, open up the rear diff and take a whiff, it makes ATF+4 smell like roses, actually don't, depending on fortitude it might make you hurl.

I'm glad to hear the shift issue was a simple fix.

 

Yeah ATF has nothing on the lovely smell of gear oil. [:'(]

 

glad to hear your tranny got fixed. I think next year I might be ready for a rebuild.

and gear oil smells soo bad. I spilt a bottle in the box of my truck and I had to power wash the whole thing out cause the smell was discusting.

 

Now I got another issue and waiting for Dan the Fastman to respond. For some reason, the tranny wants to start off in 2nd gear from a stop. For me to override this, I have to manually put my tranny in 1st gear to get it to launch in 1st gear. Now at a stop sign, if I move my shifter from D to 1st, and back to D, it will start off in 1st gear? Any ideas what would cause the tranny to want to launch in 2nd gear? It feels like a CVT tranny where it hangs at 2k rpmswhen taking off until it reaches around 30-35 mph and then starts to climb and then upshifts to 3rd gear.

Plus when this happens, when the light turns green or if you let off the brakes, the D does not move unless you touch the gas. You can really tell if the D is on a slight incline. My original tranny, even with slight incline, the idle speed of the 5.9 still have enough torque to start the D rolling from a stop.

I hope I did not get a defective tranny. This will be bad. I will end up paying too much for this tranny as I would have to pay for the S/H again and it's not cheap.

 

I don't see how you would be stuck with the S&H again if it is their defect. Let us know how it turns out.

 

Status update: Dan finally responded back to me via email. He thinks the VB may be sticking. He will have his tranny man contact me for further troubleshooting. I hope to finally have a smooth driving D soon. Right now, I have to manually launch my D in 1st gear as it won't do it in Drive mode.

 

Status update:

After speaking to Dan for a bit, and he spoke with his tranny man Martin, he thinks it may be the throttle cable that connects to the tranny that may need to be adjusted. Before I got a chance to take it to the shop to check on this, the tranny is no longer sticking to 2nd gear from a stop. This is day 2 now and the transmission appears to shift fine. Go figure. I wonder if it had to do with the initial fluids being nearly a quart low that caused this problem and after making sure the tranny is proper fluid levels, it took a couple more days for it to smooth out? I plan to drive it a little hard the next few days to make sure everything is okay.

Ken