ultimase

Ok so about a week and a half ago my toyota 4 runner, v6 with the a340h transmission, seemed to refuse to shift out of first gear. I noticed that when shifting from park to reverse or to drive the car would seem to shift normally fairly softly, then it would kick somewhat hard. Along with this you could hear a somewhat high pitch whine of what I thought sounded like gears at high speed, almost the sound you here when you reverse quickly.

Now here's the weird part.

After we limped home I let the car rest for maybe 30 minutes before taking it back out to try to reproduce the problem, and the car was back to normal, no problems. This day also happened to be the hottest day we've had so I thought maaaaybe it might be a transmission fluid problem.

So I did a normal drain and fill with amsoil ATF and also added a B&M transmission cooler. Then all seemed well.

Until tonight, once again it won't shift out of what appears to be first. The car can make it to 30ish miles per hour but at that point rpm's are hovering around 4 k, the car does respond to overdrive but that gets us another maybe 5 miles per hour. Of course it decided to do this while were about 50 miles away from home. While waiting for the tow truck I let it rest and tried again with no success.

Then after the nice drive home in the tow truck, I noticed that when putting it into drive to drive it up the driveway that I didn't get a hard kick when I shifted it. Low and behold she's back to normal?! At this point I'm guessing it's either electrical or one of the solenoids is having some difficulty, anyone else have any ideas?

hunter4runner

either solenoids going out or there is an issue with the linkage or torque convertor, will it shift manually ?

ultimase

Well here's the weird thing, it's topping out at about 30 mph maybe 35 mph with the od on. If I try shift it from drive down to 2 or l, it will lurch (HARD!) down.

ultimase

Had a chance to do some testing...

While flipping through the fsm it does mention "in the event of a simultaneous malfunction of both No.1 and No.2 speed sensors, no diagnostic code will appear and the fail-safe system will not function. However, when driving in the D range, the transmission will not up-shift from first gear, regardless of the vehicle speed."

This is interesting because it's almost exactly what I'm getting, no ecu faults, but the transmission doesn't shift. Now the question, from what I can tell, it looks like the no.1 speed sensor is in the speedometer display, if that was malfunctioning then would I continue to get a readout on the speedometer?

Also solenoid 2 did omh out to 16.9 just outside of the range of 11-15 so it looks like I might be swapping the solenoids out.

Only other thing I can think of would be the tps at this point.

hunter4runner

start out in L then manually shift to 2 then so on see if that helps

ultimase

I'll give that a shot next time it happens.

I also cleaned off the solenoid connection harness, it was pretty heavily soiled with grime. Going to drive it tomorrow a bit and see what comes from it. Then I'll check the tps and see if I can test the speed sensor in the transmission tomorrow as well.

Any clue if the speed sensor in the speedometer if it malfunctions will still give me a speed read out?

ultimase

Actually went ahead and ordered the solenoid kit from bulkpart, I figure if the solenoid is ohming out high and while looking at the FSM it does look like if solenoid number 2 has some trouble or it's stuck off, I'm not going to get into 2nd from first. I should still get third, but I didn't want to push the engine that hard to get it there, and overdrive should still give me a difference, which is pretty much replicating what's going on.

It doesn't look like a hard swap, just a little messy, so hopefully it solves what's going on. Just a pity I just put in amsoil ATF in there too. Depending on how the filter screen looks I just might convince myself to reuse the fluid.

ultimase

unfortunately after all the work in swapping the solenoid set out, the problem is still occurring.

At this point I think there's only the speed sensor or the tps left to check.

When it had a problem again yesterday I did some experimenting. While in drive it's either in 2nd or 1st, I had originally thought it was stuck in first. But when i manually shift it, "L" seems to accelerate normally, but when I manually shift it into "2" the transmission lurches almost as if it was shifted down, shifting into drive from there feels like it's going back to "L."

ultimase

too tired today, but will try to test the tps tomorrow...