ClimberDHexMods

9% window, what's the manual say?

I have used FreeSSM TCU reset 1 and 2 with success many times on many 4th gen cars. I have no knowledge of what all is required or done for the 5th gen resets

Disconnecting the battery (and thus resetting the ECU's learning) does mess with the TCU or TCU's learning. I do not know the full story there, but many people have said the trans shifted differently immediately following a battery disconnect/reconnect. Take that with a grain of salt, since who knows why or what exactly goes on there. FreeSSM was written a while ago. We were lucky to have some bits of it work so well for the 4th gen cars. 5th gen is an even bigger reach, apparently not a successful one.

I know nothing about that car specifically, as far as what all the ATF cooling needs are. If no one on this forum does either, then hookup a temp gauge and be the first! I have spent little time following the 5th Gen cars

^^^ Very well said. The 5EAT internally reads a lot higher than externally (after being pumped), maybe +10F. Makes sense, the aluminum valve body is sitting right under everything, and hot converter fluid goes back into the valve body (momentarily). ATF gets the hottest after the converter, right before entering the external cooler lines. I'm not so worried about this converter temperature spike on acceleration. Our torque converters tend to have no problems. It's the steels that worry both of us. Important to note that you do not have an OEM radiator with ATF heat exchanger. You also live in New Mexico, which does get a little bit cold, but not nearly as cold as home base of half the people on here (yet still colder than anyone on the CA coastline). I know of people who basically had your setup and had to install a thermostat; too cold. I edited the write-up to loosen the strictness of my first version. I'll make an effort to keep it updated, along with the other bazillion things going on. The main point is now when people PM me asking if they need a cooler, I'll just send them here I will edit again later to reflect these considerations you point out.

The 100 on the highway is the problem (for most people). If you do change it up, please report back. All set on existing 5EAT projects for now before getting into any more new stuff, thank you. If bluetooth OBDII can read trans temp on a 5EAT, that would be a) new, b) awesome. Please let us know if it works! You do not need a fan. The front of the car gets plenty of air flow to cool anything and everything. As he said, Derale thermostat on SummitRacing and Amazon, probably easiest to get the one with the included 3/8" barbed fittings and mounting bracket. http://derale.com/products/coolers/accessories/fluid-control-thermostats/15-heavy-duty-stainless-steel-standard-rotation-flex-fan-chrome-detail Stock really isn't that bad, and all adding a cooler will do is make stock colder. So you don't really need a cooler unless you're making a lot of heat, a lot more than the radiator's integrated heat exchanger can remove. Nice. This is the same setup that I just talked about on the phone with a person in Colorado, who still had to block the whole 4454 during the coldest winter months, even with the bypass thermostat. Just a heads up for you to keep an eye on.

It depends on what you're doing and what temps you drive in. Without the stock radiator, just get an air cooler and a bypass thermostat. Exactly, do it Automotive temp gauges are the cheapest ones, and are among the easiest to install. Without the stock radiator, your best bet is a bypass thermostat and an air cooler. There are a couple people on here with 5EAT and aluminum radiator. I don't know what will end up being the right size air cooler for you. Are you interested in installing a temperature gauge?

I keep having customers over-cooling their ATF because they plumbed their coolers wrong. You can hardly tell with a stock valve body, but with a modified valve body it can make the transmission unhappy. In either case, it's not good. Enjoy: http://legacygt.com/forums/showthread.php/properly-plumb-your-5eat-transmission-cooler-221643.html?p=4743891#post4743891

I get a lot of questions about this, and I also spend a lot of time informing people how to fix their incorrectly-plumbed ATF cooler setups. There are a lot of well-meaning people out there with incorrect thoughts regarding cooling the 5EAT. Thus, there is a lot of less than ideal advice going around these forums and elsewhere. So this thread may serve to correct these long-standing errors. Primarily, the goal here is to get people to STOP OVER-COOLING THEIR ATF! In my perfect world, ATF would always be between 160-180F. On the hot side of the range, short rises to 200F are fine and are part of normal factory-setup behavior with modern fluids prescribed to the 5EAT, especially with aftermarket synthetic ATFs. On the cold side, ATF can linger as low as 120*F pretty normally during instances when it's cold out, speeds are high, and instances of acceleration are minimal. Some say 100F is acceptable for the low side. I have not made up my mind about this. At any rate, these are good points of reference to start. Please excuse the basic nature of these drawings. http://legacygt.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=175729&stc=1&d=1393521481 Stock. This is fine for most people. It's not perfect. ATF can be overheated, and ATF can certainly be over-cooled, in the way the car comes from the factory. This is an acceptable setup for cold climates. It is not a good setup for hot climates that have a lot of stop-and-go traffic or mountains, and is not great for towing or road course racing. If in a hot climate you do many back-to-back rounds of acceleration, or create heat some other way (towing) then you should invest in a transmission cooler, and should strongly consider a bypass thermostat as well (more on that later). http://legacygt.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=175730&stc=1&d=1393521481 This is how many people have theirs setup, and this is generally how threads tell people to setup their cooling systems. This setup can sometimes work fine, yet at other times it can be worse than stock. In cold winters, this can a step down. In the middle of summer, it can work fine. The logic somewhat makes sense if you're using incorrect assumptions. Assuming the car is a roaring fire-breathing monster, whatever temp trans fluid comes out of the radiator will be better off being cooled just a bit more, so you might as well get the biggest cooler for those potential future hill climb stages, since you never know. The reality is this takes ATF from the trans, normalizes it to the cold side of the engine coolant radiator (good, unless you're making a lot of heat during that driving session). Then through the air cooler after the radiator, the ATF is cooled down. If the cooler is big enough, this can lower temperatures close to ambient. This can potentially be bad if it's cold enough out. This works well if most of the time your transmission is producing far more heat than a normal car (it's probably not), or your engine coolant is perpetually overheated (it's probably not), or you do not drive in cold weather or on long stretches of highway. In reality, you car is producing excessive heat rarely, maybe only 1%-5% of the time, unless it's a race car that gets trailored to and from road courses. And even when excessive heat is produced, if it's only for seconds (like when drag racing or driving up one steep hill), then the stock cooling system would be more than adequately setup to handle that. http://legacygt.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=175731&stc=1&d=1393521481 This is the better way to plumb a (small) air cooler if you are certain that you want one, yet are not willing to pay the modest price and endure the moderate frustration of fitting a proper bypass thermostat. If you already have your air cooler plumbed, then this is a reasonable conversion to perform at home, though to be fair the different will be modest, not dramatic, as the radiator is not a massive liquid/liquid heat exchanger. Most important, this setup has minimal risk of allowing ATF significantly over 180F, yet will help keep ATF temp from dropping too far below 160F in the 90% of driving conditions when the ATF is easily cooled by just the radiator, and weather is warm. However, ATF temperatures can still linger around 100F with this setup in cool weather, especially in the winter, which is why a bypass thermostat is very helpful. This setup will also slightly slow down the speed at which everything initially warms up. In summary, when compared to the "poor" setup above, this version is a better version, offering more benefit with less drawback across a wide range of weather and other conditions of use. http://legacygt.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=175732&stc=1&d=1393521481 In my opinion, this is the only good one-size-fits-all way to plumb an air cooler: with a bypass thermostat. However, you can still have over-cooling issues with this setup (see notes below). Derale and other companies make bypass thermostats that actuate at 180F, and include 4x 3/8" barb fittings and a universal mounting bracket as either a bundle or as an add-on. Transmission rebuilds cost $$$$, ATF fluid changes cost $$$, so do yourself a favor and buy and install a bypass thermostat. It will pad out both ends of the temperature spectrum, allowing faster warmups and a more average temperature, while still offering full cooling ability when things get hot. If you do not have an OEM Radiator (not pictured) then your best bet is to use a bypass thermostat and air cooler. This can be a bit more difficult to dial in for year-round stability if you live in a climate that has hot summers and very cold winters. You will not have the radiator to pull down hot ATF temps or pull up cold ATF temps. Over-cooling becomes very easy without a radiator, even if you have a bypass thermostat (though the bypass thermostat does help a lot). If you have a non-OEM radiator, then it's probably worth your while to buy a temperature gauge. That said, many other cars come from the factory with an air cooler and a bypass thermostat, without a radiator heat exchanger provision. The difference is those coolers are sized to provide adequate cooling from -30F to +130F while being driven normally. Additional notes on cooler selection and temperature monitoring: 1) Most people on here (I have been guilty of this plenty) forget that their car will most likely spend 99% of the time NOT racing or towing heavy loads up mountains. This means that most of the time, your car is not producing tremendous amounts of heat, and thus is no trouble for just the stock radiator to regulate. 2) My opinion is that smaller transmission air coolers are satisfactory for the 5EAT, unless you're doing serious racing or serious mountain climbing, or live where it's quite hot. For example, the Long Tru-Cool 4454 is a popular model on here because it "is the biggest that will fit on one side of the center support bar." In fact, the 4451 may be plenty of cooling for you, or me, or many people, even if it appears to be quite small. Take a look at the coolers installed on big vehicles with tow packages, or small delivery trucks. Hint: These coolers work far better than you might think, depending on placement. A transmission is not an engine that produces glowing hot exhaust when you give it gas. There is no transmission combustion, no fuel being lit on fire. That said, I do not know exactly the right size for your application, more on that below. 3) These bypass thermostats only recycle around 90% of fluid at most. Even with 10% of ATF still going through the coolers, you can easily over-cool ATF in the winter. I recently talked with a 5EAT owner in Colorado who still had over-cooling (monitoring ATF temp via gauge) after installing a bypass thermostat. The solution was to temporarily (through the winter) block his big air cooler. The result was rock steady ATF temps at around 180F. When your transmission cooler is so big that it can receive just a small portion of total fluid via bypass thermostat, and it still drops aggregate ATF temperature to well below 160F, your cooler might be too big, or you might need to cover some portion or all of it until warm temperatures return. Even a covered/obscured air cooler still sheds considerable heat, even if its efficiency is reduced via deliberate obstruction. I want to conclude by saying that I do not know the perfect setup for year-round stability, from cold winter to hot summer environments that will always yield a ~160-180F ATF temperature. As I said above, your best bet is probably a bypass thermostat and a reasonably-sized cooler, plumbed the right way. As for watching temperatures amid extreme heat and extreme cold, I recommend any fluid temperature gauge. Any automotive temperature gauge compatible with oil (almost all of them are), will tell you what you need to know. If you have other gauges besides a boost gauge, then you would be wise to add a temperature gauge for your 5EAT. You can tap into the fluid stream in many places, but it doesn't matter very much where as long as it's somewhere. Whether in the trans pan or T'd into the cooler line output (hot side) or return hose (cold side), you will get useful readings that will indirectly (or directly) indicate when the mean ATF temp has risen or fallen far from 180F. The reality is that some 300whp 5EAT weekend track cars on here will need greater ATF cooling provisions than most of the >400whp street monsters that will instead benefit from having a deliberately small cooler, or specifically no extra cooler at all if the circumstances are right for it. I am routinely baffled by similar people with the 4454 cooler and similar power setups reporting transmission behavior that in effect means each is seeing different ATF temperatures. Things such as typical vehicle usage, local climate, cooler placement and FMIC obstruction each make some amount of difference. When you add up everything, you end up seeing different ideal cooling setups for different cars. If you care enough to want rock solid ATF temps, then buy a gauge, and observe what happens during the hottest hot, the coldest cold, while towing up a hill, while racing, while cruising on the highway, while in stop-and-go traffic, or during whatever it is you do with your car. This will tell you what you need to know better than anyone on here can, including me. Please ask any questions. Thank you, David @ HexMods LLC

Those center lockup frictions get worn, maybe that's it? They see the most dynamic friction of any clutch pack, and they are neither big or many.

If you put it in manual 1st gear, that center should lockup as hard as it's ever going to.

The factory service manual explains it really well, is an interesting read

I say 350/350 at the wheels to be safe, but I have several customers running at 400+/400+ at the wheels, with no issues except some small finicky shifting on occasion (due to the TCU). You will of course go through transmissions faster with 400wtq than 175wtq, but not at a crazy rate. If you're already at that power, then you already understand that all your maintenance schedules are sped up. As Frank said, the OBXT has a shorter final drive in the front and rear diff than the LGT. The final drive ratios in the front and rear need to match. So if you switch one, you need to switch both. As frank said, you either need to swap the front diff or the rear diff's ring and pinion set. Just more time and potentially more money. Some autocrossers and road racers want the OBXT ratio in their LGTs. Conversely, more do-everything setups like Frank and myself want the longest ratio possible, so we stick to the LGT ratios.

Much better! Less overlap FTW. You have a turbo so probably don't want it having much overlap anyways...

Bump, great idea, love it. But isn't that port you tapped a 1/8" BSPT, NOT a NPT? If yes, the two standards are off 1 thread per inch, which means you can only get a turn in on the fitting before the aluminum threads start to change shape...

Not sure if serious...

Assuming all your supporting mods are reliable: 100% yes or 100% no or anything inbetween, depending ENTIRELY on the tune.

Occasionally you see a mechanical or even a clutch-type rear R160 on NASIOC classifieds for a reasonable price, which almost always are far stronger than stock. You could chance it with a generic chinese ebay r160 mechanical diff, as you woud take it apart and clean it up and make sure it's shimmed right, then cross your fingers it does not have major casting imperfections. The German OEM 3.27 option looks interesting, but would it be a pain for you to convert the axle flanges?

Mr. KCwagon just summed up all forum knowledge. Lots of very smart engineers on here who would blue screen the second a realistic PIA car problem crossed their path. To do is to achieve a high state of being. To do is to learn, and to do is to know. Thank you for summing up my personal and career goals so simply and thoroughly.

My stock fuel system was the only iteration that did not have some annoying problem or another.

Forgive my lack of EE cred... is one way of doing this to simple put a second OEM FPCM in parallel with the first one?

I still freak out and stare every time I see a G8, especially if it has a LS3, which is almost never. Camaro, not that we were really missing out on anything, but that wasn't for sale in 2003-2009. If you wanted a GM LS V8 through most of the 2000s, you either bought a Corvette, a specific Cadillac, a couple very limited others, or a pickup truck/SUV. If you wanted a fast Ford, you bought a Mustang or nothing. Practically a mono-culture. But yes things are a lot better now, lots of new fun things are out, more coming. Power and performance is more competitive.

It does. Important note though, the valve body upgrade for it is not finished with development, so that would come later. Everything else can be made to order. Am I mistaken? Between the Falcons, HSV, Vauxhall, R34, S15, top model Subarus... we don't get ANY of that. After a long stint of nothingness, we finally got a limited number of the Monaro and Commodore for a couple years (Pontiac trim), but then GM dropped those just as fast. Australia gets fast cars that we simply don't.

No worries, that was more aimed at the Australians. Have several shipments going halfway around the world next week. Australia: Where muscle cars never died out.

To clarify, I service pre-facelift LGTs, and I do have valve bodies ready to ship within a couple days of receiving an order.