So, Elmore was our home base at the paddock Friday and much of Saturday just like he always is for me. Only difference was, he was immobile. I was mostly depressed about the truck on Friday but woke up Saturday realizing I had to get my E36 M3 together and figure out how it was going to get home. I made a post here, on the AER Facebook page and put it up on Uship. I eventually connected with a shipper offline and we came to an agreement. His home base was a few hours away from the track and timing was going to work well with my afternoon stint and helping with the final driver change.
Before the tow guy showed up, I attempted to start Elmore to see if he would even move and, no spark. Huh. Confirmed voltage at the coil and nothing coming out of the wires. Pulled the cap and saw that one of the wires running to the Mallory unit was frayed. Goodness! I hastily scabbed that wire together and Elmore was a runner again. At this point the tow driver was there, had a flat on his trailer and was very patient letting me poke around with the truck. Once it was running, I tried driving it around. Same deal. Dragging real bad leaving from a stop and very unhappy in gear. It would sit and idle just fine though and I was able to drive it on to the trailer which, maybe oddly, felt really good.
He was chained down and then on his way. I eventually got a pics around 10 that night of him back home in my driveway.
I did nothing with the truck yesterday evening when I got home but did some testing on work breaks today. It started right up and ran well but the moving condition is unchanged. It feels almost like the emergency brake is on when you take off (there isn't one) and when I tried to drive up my street it wouldn't even make it up the slight hill.
It lurches when you engage reverse as well as drive but then it's just unbelievably sluggish in both directions. I think if it were the pump gone bad, I wouldn't have positive engagement with those. Since I know next to nothing about automatic transmissions, I did some internet searching which suggested that maybe the governor was sticking and I found a method in a few places where you drive slowly at part throttle in drive and then shift directly to reverse and doing the same in the opposite direction. I tried that in my driveway a few times with no change.
At this point, after taking to a mechanic friend and a local shop, I'm guessing it's the torque converter, which would make sense. Although I don't trust the shop who rebuilt the trans two years ago, the only thing they didn't change was the torque converter. It's at least 30 years old and has been on towing duty for going on 9 racing seasons.
I looked into pricing of a new torque converter rated for towing and they seem to be at lease $300, usually more.
If anyone has thoughts, suggestions, I'm all ears but I'm thinking it's time to just yank this trans and start into the manual swap. Elmore's next tow duty is the weekend of June 28th so I think I could make it happen in that amount of time.
