Allison Vs 68RFE Comparison

[Applause] [Music] hey guys hey i'm going to tell you guys in the next minute how excited we are and what we're releasing here we've got the allison transmission set up so you can drop it right behind your cummins everything's seamless this is our brand new bellhousing this bellhousing allows us to take the allison transmission bolt it right up to the back of your engine so everything works the new electronics package makes all your creature comforts work everything's super seamless so stick with me and i'll tell you all about it hey guys clint with ats today and this is the first of several series that we're talking about installing an allison transmission behind your cummins so you know this has been a very long topic for years and years and years as soon as the allison came out in the duramax you know all the five nine and especially six seven truck owners have been yearning and allison behind their cummins for good reason you know the allison is is a is a is a great transmission so not that the 68 isn't a great transmission but getting there you know is is expensive and i'm gonna do my best to give you guys all the knowledge and gals when you're making this decision because generally if you're even considering putting allison behind your cummins that means you've fully invested in your vehicle you love your vehicle and we use them to do our daily chores and you know without your truck you know it's you're you're you basically are handicapped and we get that in for that reason is why you know the 68 rfe has such a terrible reputation you know in the industry for being not reliable and just not being doing what it needs to do because bottom line it's a gas training so i'm going to kind of take step by step and i'm also going to give you some insight on how the transmissions how how ats after all these years has decided to go about doing a swap from either a 48 or a 68 or an acen you know 68 or an async 69 pretty much anything and being able to put the world famous allison behind the cummins and making making it absolutely factory what i mean say factory like everything works and it's like it's like the factory assembly and you can't hardly you know you can't argue with that i mean when the factory builds up and they set out to build something that is primo they do a really good job of it and that's the goal everything we do here at ats the goal is to make everything what we call factory and that means factory fit everything works so i'm gonna i'm gonna kind of walk you through on these next few series on how we go about doing that so what you're looking at here basically is the 68 on the right side and the allison on the left side and the parts in front of it are generally i'm going to do some show you some comparisons between the clutch pack the pumps the input shaft the output shaft the valve body control system the case um so it kind of makes some sense for you and i think by the time i'm done with this you'll have a very good idea of if you're comfortable with the 68 you know 68's are fantastic trainings once you build them once you put all these parts in them or if you want to upgrade to the allison so this is kind of where we start so i'm going to give you a little background the two you see here the 68 rfe transmission is essentially a 545 it's a it's a gas transmission it was designed if you go way back the basic transmission design was the gear set the clutch pack design was designed by way back in the liaison days in chrysler and it was a caravan yeah a little front row drive caravan it kind of grew up it got a little bit bigger it finally went to rear wheel drive and then they ex they blew it up big enough to where it would actually made a really nice half ton truck transmission and that's essentially what's in the 1500 rams um you know for for the last 15 years and it's a pretty good and then in 07 and a half when the 6-7 came out they decided that they needed a transmission that was going to work behind the cummins so they kind of got in a pinch and was either you know make a deal with acen or allison or take an existing chrysler transmission and yet again put it behind a bigger motor so that's where the 68 rfe came out 68 rfe basically was a gas transmission that was increased in size a little bit on the pump and the torque converter so it could bolt right behind the the cummins and bigger bell housing so what you have so in essence what the 68 rfe is is it's a 1500 transmission that has all the same planetaries all the same gut bags all the same clutches everything's the same a little bit bigger pump and a bigger torque converter so you can kind of see where that was headed i mean it wasn't headed down a great road and what we have today is the entire aftermarket we're dealing with all these ramifications of just an undersized transmission and probably not the best design power flow which has a lot to do with the overdrive section so i want you guys to watch one of my other videos that i go into detail and talk about all the upgrades in the 68 rfe now i'm not talking you out of a 68 rfe because a 68 rfe is a great transmission we do a ton of them it's really one of my favorites probably because i've invested so much time and money into making it great but it's still a small transmission so we're going to kind of switch gears now we're going to go over to the allison the allison transmission obviously adults allison is a transmission company that has been building big allison stuff for a very very long time and because of that they're really kind of a heavy-duty you know medium duty heavy-duty company well in 2001 when the allison 1000 came out it was a brand new design six-speed automatic gear ratios are very similar to the 68 rfe but big and what makes it the the allison so robust right out of the factory is it's it's a big transmission and it's also designed from a medium duty or actually almost heavy duty but let's just call it medium duty because it's medium duty like the 3000 series 3000 series is a massive training it's the exact same power flow so the the gear set the way the way they handle power from first to sixth is is uh is genius i mean it's fantastic it's easy on the gear set it's easy on the shafts so the basic flower power though is good but bottom line is they took a 3000 transmission and they made they downsized it a little bit so it was more along the the lines of a medium duty transmission or a really stout light duty transmission which is really about ideal for what we need in these trucks i mean when you're talking about you know five nine or six seven cummins the amount of torque the cummins makes is awesome i mean it's just it's it's it's ridiculous and especially when you turn it up so now you're now you're talking about an engine that doesn't really want to stop you know you keep putting weight behind it and it keeps grunting so there's no secret that this that the cummins motor you know is one of the best you know out there and absolutely the highest on torque you know max torque is a 1700 rpm it torques heavily you know at 1200 and that's where these that's where these trucks you know you have normal gears in them even normal-sized tires you're cruising down the interstate you know you hit a little hill you got your fifth wheel in the back whatever it is the cummins just keeps on trucking and that's where the smaller components get into trouble and that's kind of where the 68 started to get into trouble the allison doesn't because it's so big so i've got a whole i've got a whole another video also that it that explains all the all the upgrades and all the little increases that we do on the allison but i'll tell you what we have to do the allison to make it hold a reasonable amount of power versus what we have to do to a 68 to make it hold a reasonable amount of power is night and day 68 we have to fill it full of bullet parts i mean pumps and channel plates and and clutches and co-pilot all that other stuff the allison we don't have to do a ton to it we have to upgrade the clutch backs we change the hydraulics a little bit we do have all the upgrades for the bigger power levels but short of having to upgrade the torque converter and upgrade the clutch packs and the hydraulics a little bit you don't have to do a ton now so you're probably asking well it's a no-brainer why wouldn't i just stick an allison in behind my cummins this is where the problem comes in okay so the first part is the allison was never built with a bell housing that would fit your engine this is the bell housing that it comes with there's two bill houses this is your gm bell housing the other is an sae bell housing because they did put the allison transmission behind cummins motors in medium duty vehicles all the time dump trucks all kinds of stuff the deal is is it's an it's a it's a big round bell house and a big long adapter plate it has mounts on it and it's it's so big it doesn't really fit into a light duty you know like the vehicles that we drive right so it does it's not feasible by the time you buy the adapter plates and try to move all around you know it's such a mess that it doesn't fit it's too expensive and then you roll into getting to operate and i'll get into that here in just a little bit but when you're talking about bolting it up when you adapt them currently today you know the entire industry everybody out there if you look at you know you google allison cummins conversions right when you there's there's a ton of people that are are companies that are have kits and they're allowing the allison to be bolted onto the back of a cummins the problem is is everybody is using this gm bell housing the reason is because that's the only thing that's available so what you do in the gm bell housing the gm bellhousing is smaller so it just allows the converter to fit you have to put an adapter plate on your cummins which means you take your factory adapter plate off i also have the second part of this video shows these modifications you have to take your adapter plate off and then add another adapter plate and then change the flywheel and then most inherently which is terrible which is what really drove me motivated me because we're having so much so many clients that were asking would you please help me put a allison behind my cummins like i don't like the way it has to be done because you have to grind half the block off so literally you have to get in there with a grinder you have to grind the passenger side of the block i mean like you have to grind it like all the way into the bolt hole i mean we're talking like an inch by four or five inches you have to get in there and grind the block which grinding the block is generally probably never a great idea you know in my opinion i hate doing it we just try to refrain from it so realize the first thing we've really got to do is make the allison transmission just a drop in replacement that means we need to make it both to the back of the engine we need to make the transfer gas bolt to it and then we'll handle the electronics well start going down the road and as we really was once we identified that we want to that we're going to go down this road and we're going to do everything 100 went ahead and dove in this is the bell housing that we offer so this bell house and what we did basically is replace this bell housing which is part of your pump channel plate i mean it's a it's a big deal it bolts here right so we've made this bell housing that 100 percent mimics the cummins or the chrysler bell housing so it bolts right the back of the engine the torque converter was the next part you know the 68 rfe essentially we we build this torque converter from scratch because the factory converter is kind of the right size but it doesn't it's really wimpy the clutch design it's terrible so our five star converters we manufacture everything inside of there and you get the torque converter i've also got another video that you can look inside our torque converters and i'll kind of walk you through them exactly the square tab and how it works the allison was pretty easy at that point because we take the same exact torque converter and we build our cover make it a six bolt make our square tabs billet stator our impeller all that stuff so now everything is exactly the same so when you put the torque converter in the front of the torque converter mimics exactly what the 68 rfp is so if you look at your center lines your bell housing your bolts your dowel pins where the converter sits your hub diameter bolts everything everything is 100 so now you you can literally drop your chrysler transmission out and you bolt the cummins transmission in and you don't have to move the starter that means you're using the factory starter which is designed for the cummins instead of having to put a six liter starter on it because that's the that's the starter that's used because it's really small because remember your base circle gets smaller so everybody that's putting analysis behind these things they had to you know basically use a smaller converter the smaller flex plate because a smaller bell housing and that forces you to get an aftermarket starter which is six liter the ford six liter starter is the only one that's small enough that's also gear driven it's also not a reliable starter so you grind the block and you get that starter really tight up in there so it'll get to the get to the ring gear just just not the kind of reliability that i'm after so you get rid of all that and now you have a belt has the bolts up you have a torque converter that bolts right to the factory flex plate now anytime you're doing a cummins conversion i mean i really do highly recommend our billet flex plate mainly because all of our converters instead of the factory six bolts have 12 volts so anytime you can increase the the amount of bolts on the flex plate you're going to take you're going to cut that stress in half so you're basically talking about reliability so it all bolts up so then we'll get into okay now the transmission is bolted in the vehicle easily so you take your you know your six hour retrofit channel plate or the retrofit backing plate all that kind of stuff to kind of adapt one in to literally one hour take the transmission out both the transmission up and then the transmission's mounted it's done it's all factory it's all very very clean bolt your transfer case on do a little bit of driveline work start hanging components on it so we've made the the installation just super simple now get into electronics um we'll cover that a little bit later episode but we've also made the electronics so everything is completely factory your factory tap shifter works your indicator if you have a 68 acen or 68 in the vehicle literally the companion modules that we built so it takes the information from the alice computer and translates it to the engine computer and the engine computer translates it back to the alice computer everything is factory-like so everything is very seamless that means the vehicle you're driving around the engine thinks that you still have a chrysler transmission when you have an allison so your backup camera your cruise control your indicator your tap shifter your transfer case automatic shift all of those functions that are looking for commands from the tcm if you don't have those commands then none of those functions work and that's something you need to realize that if you don't have a perfectly designed integration package electronics integration package to allow the transfer the engine to get that information that it's missing from the factory then all these creature comfort things they don't work anymore i mean things like as simple as a remote start that came from the factory something as simple as you put in reverse and reverse lights camera come on something as simple as cruise control those are things that i don't want to that i'm not okay losing when i change the transmission up because i'm looking for reliability you know i'm not okay losing those things you know it's just it's not and that's one of the really sweet things about the package we're offering is every single piece works at all it all works as factory so i'm going to kind of move on to showing you a couple of the comparisons you know now that now that you kind of get a base idea of like what it's going to take to go from a chrysler transmission to an allison transmission and show you a few of the pieces as far as the hard parts go so so kind of my intent here is to give you an apples to apples kind of comparison and i know it's kind of hard because it's like apples and oranges but but the big decision to be made here right so i'm going to show you some of the some of the major differences between these two transmissions one when we when we stick with the 68 the va the just the valve body itself i mean you're talking about the things you have to upgrade is you know full full billet channel plate all billet accumulators re-modified or steel valves a lot of work done to this valve body the allison valve body and we also need a co-pilot on the 68 just because again the design so you're kind of like dealing with the hydraulic modifications and you have to co the copilot on the allison swap we've built the co-pilot features into our tcm which is really killer so essentially this the valve body you get brand new really sweet bolts in that does all the controls when you're talking about the pump get an idea of what's going on with the pump this is our 68 pump every 68 we build has a billet pump in them pretty much had to do that just because the chrysler pump doesn't give us the size and the material so again we go into that more detail later this is the pump on the on the allison i mean it's a monster you know it just gives us that's the heartbeat right i mean that's what gives us that's the blood flow that's what gives us the pressure and the volume and the cooling and everything for that basically scaled down medium duty right so you're starting to get a little bit of an idea it's just just bigger and it's just inherently better your low reverse clutch this is what you use when you're back in the trailer up the hill this is the clutch in the 68 rfe this is the clutch in an allison basically do the exact same job you know just bigger not to mention there's a lot more of them so you just don't have to do a lot of extra modifications you know to get them to do the job the third gear clutch for instance now the allison the low reverse clutch i'm sorry the the second gear third gear clutch they're basically the same that's what you have here so obviously you know when you're when we're talking about these clutches we're talking first second third you know both are pretty good for a second and third reverse the real problem comes into overdrive on the 68 rfe fourth gear we all know that fourth gear is just miserating because the the power flow the size of the clutches the hydraulics these are essentially more kind of like your fourth gear clutches you know that are on this is what you're comparing to okay on your 68 these are your fourth gear clutches not only do you have such a bigger clutch back on the allison i mean you have so many of them this is all we can put into a 68 but look at the size and if you're looking at the clutch itself right give you a really good idea allison versus 68. this is the big failure on the 68 we just you know the industry just fights keeping these things alive for many many reasons again i go into it on our full explanation of the 68 rfe upgrade again not to talk to 68 down 6.8 is a great and those of you that are looking for you know a good reliable transmission that is going to do normal work then the 68 is certainly a little bit less money of course with the bell housing with our electronics with everything we've done on the allison and also not having to go with extreme upgrades in the allison it really is shifting that cost down to where you know you're only a couple thousand dollars apart whether you go for the allison upgrade or you go the 68 upgrade a couple other things i want to show you your input shaft this is your input shaft in your overdrive clutch drum on your 68 rfe everything we do pretty much on the 68 is generally a billet input that's in our stage true the allison you don't need to do a billet input shaft until you're well up in the 500 plus or 600 horsepower range this is the input shaft so you get kind of get an idea you got 68 you got allison you know it's just kind of like damn it's it's just it's a big deal right intermediate shaft same type of deal so you're talking intermediate shaft you know you got you've got the same type of thing you the intermediate or your overdrive shaft just just bigger you know just having the having all those years of allison taking that big medium duty transmission and kind of shrinking it down slightly for a light duty truck versus taking a 1500 transmission and trying to grow it up but not really grow it up because this parts didn't get bigger that's really where so much of the deficiencies have come from so you know that that's kind of that that's kind of the heart of of what's happening here now i didn't cover the 69 the 68 or the 68 the 9 the 68 transmissions are generally not really rebuildable there's no additional upgrades for them no hard parts the parts are very expensive um some of the stuff you can't even buy individually you have to buy valve body and pump assemblies together from the dealer it's it's it's really a problem so if you have a 68 rsc like from 07 to 12 just just just go to the allison you know just don't even waste your money because the 68 or the 68 rc which is the ace in early acen is incredibly problematic the 69 is a pretty darn good now that came out in 13 and it cut in it and it continues to run today it's a big and it holds good power but there's no tcm tuning and you know the just the the inherent way it's designed it runs max line pressure all the time so in the typical transmission world in order to make these trainees hold more power we'll increase line pressure well they've already maxed line pressure out and they control the cut clutch applications based on on time and off time of the clutches so the so the 69 is big it's about the same size the allison it holds good power and it's pretty reliable but it doesn't function well it doesn't shift really well under heavy power demands um there's absolutely no tcm tuning there the parts are very expensive the same type of deal so it's kind of getting that point that if you want a basic you know upgrade you know like a stage one stage 269 that's you know that's that's a good that's an upgrade package but for what it costs to upgrade it to an allison you kind of get everything and what i didn't mention yet is with this allison you get full transmission tuning capability that's because we're using an open architect tcm that allows us to log right into it you can log into it you can literally use efi live get into the allison tcm you can program your up shifts your down shifts your part throttle shifts your torque converter clutch application the big thing that it means to you is you can set it up or we can set up for your exact tire size your exact gear ratio your exact engine size and with our electronics we're taking all the torque tables from the engine that it's transmitting to the tcm and we transmit that information to the allison tcm so again the allison tcm thinks it was designed from the factory belongs in that vehicle and the vehicle's computer thinks that it's talking to or getting information from the 68 or the 69 or whatever tcm it was so it's a complete pass-through so pretty much we're giving you everything you've ever wanted ease of installation full driver control all the creature comforts at an affordable price so i tell you what i'm i'm excited about this we've been working on this diligently for several years now and after all these years getting all the electronics all the tuning finding you know figuring out all the right parts casting the bell housing getting the converter dialed in the right internal components having the cores so we can buy all these parts new and we buy a ton of this stuff brand new you know a lot of this now the other thing you're probably thinking like okay what about core charges this the other thing that's really cool so we are offering any upgrades that the core charge if you have a 68 we will receive your 68 core in lieu of the core charge that would come for the allison so if you got a 68 or 69 or you know 48 or whatever that is we'll do you an even swap so now you're talking about a very expensive core you know finding a six-speed core is not easy but again because we're buying so much stuff brand new instead of re-ban it we built that in the cost so we can offset it by getting your core back whatever it is so you don't have to deal with that old transmission that's useless or burned up or try to sell it or whatever we ship you a brand new allison you ship your core back the core charges can even swap so that's that's that's kind of a good deal so anyway we got more videos coming um this is a this is a pretty pretty fun build for us the elaborate install we're doing a couple we're doing an install in 69 um next and we're doing an install on the 68 i'm right behind that so you can kind of follow the build and show you some questions to come up but we'll do our best to answer everything and check us out on our website atsdiesel.com and appreciate you guys you

Channel: ATS Diesel Performance

Views: 112,176

Rating: 4.9282274 out of 5

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Id: sLriz4DTn5I

Length: 27min 11sec (1631 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021