'93 Maxima, recent transmission work...transmission acting wrong.

[MinisterofDOOM]

All right I'm going to try to give as much detail as possible, so sorry about the long post.

The car is a 1993 J30-D Maxima GXE, built in September of 1992. It's got an auto trans. 179k on the odometer.

First week of November, my transmission died on me on a 2-3 shift. I got the car into a shop for a rebuild. They finally finished with the car the day before Thanksgiving. I let my dad drive it home (he's the one who paid for it) and he told me it was all wrong. I took it for a drive myself, and noticed that a) it was not upshifting correctly. It waited too long, shifted WAY too hard. and b) the car wasn't downshifting properly. Normally, at certain RPM/speed/throttle combinations, the car will drop one or two gears and I'll have a lot of power. It wasn't doing that anymore. So I took it back in after the holiday and they said to give it a while to break in. I waited 15 days, then took it back in, it was still not right. They had it for a week, and said it was fixed. I picked it up and it still wasn't right. Now it shifted softer, and upshifted earlier (right at redline, almost all the time). They put a shift kit in, so the hard shifts and high shifts are explained there. That's ok...it's actually nice that way, it holds gears longer through turns and such now. The problem was that now it wouldn't downshift. At all. I had to manually downshift. Even going up hills, I had to manually drop through the gears. So I took it in a third time. They had it until last monday (the third of January) which was about a week. They called in the shop's owner to test drive it with me. It's a lot better. But it still won't downshift correctly. I can be getting on the freeway, for instance, and be cruising at 35. Originally, if I put the pedal to the floor, the car would drop clear to first and I'd have gobs of power. Now, it stays in third, and bogs terribly. The owner of the shop says that there is nothing he can do to adjust this, since the transmission is entirely electronic and receives all its signals from various engine computers and sensors. He says that it may learn what it's supposed to do and go back to normal. But he says there is nothing more the shop can do to fix the car.

But the car didn't act anything like it does now with the original transmission. I have no power on demand anymore, since it won't drop even one gear, even if I put the pedal to the floor. I'm having to manually downshift for power...it's irritating. I would think there has to be some way to tune a computer and control every single aspect of the transmissions operation, but according to the transmission shop, that's not the case.The car now shifts at redline, or just barely below, even under normal driving. The 1-2 shift is VERY hard, but that is due to the shift kit (they said that the hard 1-2 shift is popular amongst import tuners because it chirps the tires...it does exactly that and it's driving me nuts.). And the car drops one gear if I'm lucky under heavy throttle, and it takes a moment for the shift to happen...it's delayed. It won't drop more than one, ever, even if I'm cruising at 30-35 and it's in 4th at 2k RPMs and I floor it...the old transmission would have dropped to second, come up to about 4500-5k, and given me lots of power. Now it just bogs down in fourth.

My main questions are these:

1)Is it possible to get my car to downshift properly, as it did originally?

2)If it is possible, is it something only a Nissan dealership can do, or should a transmission shop have that ability? I ask this because if it's something a transmission shop should be able to do, I am going to get my money from the idiots who worked on my car. They never mentioned anything about not being able to make things work correctly, or not having the proper tuning equipment until AFTER they had been paid.

3)What can I expect to pay if I have to have a dealer do this work.

4)Is it possible for me to go in and mess around with TPS and cables, or is it something I should just avoid alltogether? The cable length and TPS are the only things the transmission shop adjusted to change the transmission's behavior, so I don't want to play with it much, but if that's my only option, I may have to.

5) is the transmission bogging down during acceleration going to damage anything?

And 6) Will the car eventually "learn" what to do, and figure out it should be downshifting, all on its own?

I think I covered everything. If there's any critical info you need that I forgot to mention, just let me know, but I think I covered it all.

Oh, one last thing. The car had a bad forward motor mount until satuday. The bushing was broken, but I have replaced it now. It has not affected any of the behavior at all. The shop told me that was why the 1-2 shift was so hard, but that sounds like bull to me. The shift is no softer with a new mount.

Thanks for any help in advance.

Modified by MinisterofDOOM at 3:50 AM 1/10/2005
Modified by MinisterofDOOM at 3:54 AM 1/10/2005

[Altiman94]

The transmission should perform exactly like it did before. If you did not ask for a shift kit to be installed, have them remove it and perform an exacting rebuild back to stock specs. It should perform just like it did when it was new. You ar ebeing fed a line of bs to save the shop owners ***.

[s13sr20chris]

ditto

dont let the matter drop