TH400 Valvebody Install (Auto/Manual High Horsepower)

all right today we want to talk about how to install our automatic manual shift turbo 400 valve body for the higher horse applications the difference of this valve body is is that uses the modulator control shift points but the modulator pressure has no bearing on line pressure whatsoever so the line pressure we set more like a manual shift or a transmitting valve body so the pressure is always there it's very very quick response time and we don't have problems burning up clutches so I want to go over first is you know you get the valve body from us dyno tested already all done comes with a pressure regulator spring that's going to increase our line pressure up to anywhere from say 170 PSI all the way to 220 depending on some shims and stuff that we use which we'll go over in a few minutes it's going to come with a set of gaskets and then it's going to come with a separator plate for it let's talk about the pressure regulator spring that we send with the valve body this one is about 170 220 psi depending on how many shims we use on the pressure regulator valve so we're going to talk about that right now so here's a late-model pressure regulator valve and you want to make sure that if you have a pump that you have that balance hole right there with this style of valve if this passage is solid and there's no hole drilled you want to make sure you use a valve that has a hole all the way through the center that connects to here and comes out here because that is your balanced pressure that's what's going to make this valve push against the spring and start to regulate so if that holes not there or the holes not here this thing will make 5 to 600 pounds of line pressure and it will break things so that's one of the things you have to make sure so this is a late valve with a late pump so we're going to put the valve in the bore and the shims that I'm talking about so we have the factory spring retainer they would hold the spring if we wanted to shim this up they come they a lot of times come with this little C style shim that you would stick on and you'd push down like that and then you'd put this on top of it and then the spring like this and that's how it would sit in the bore so we typically use one shim with this spring that'll give us about 190 to 200 psi if we run two shims we can get it up to about 220 so we're gonna put this valve in with that already preassembled hopefully you'll stay if not we're gonna try all right we're gonna put this valve in making sure there's no birds it should go right in nice and free no trouble whatsoever we're gonna take the shim we're gonna put the shim on all right what I like to do is I like to take the spring and I'll dip it in grease and get some grease on the end of it like this to glue that on there just like that with the fingers going into the spring so it's nice and flat on this side now I can push that into the bore just like that and everything is positioned the next thing we want to check to make sure that our pressures are what I described earlier we want to make sure that the boost valve is a 481 or 480 to diameter boost valve and rare occasions there are boost valves where this land is smaller and it will give you less pressure so to hold this together we do we do kind of the same trick we take the valve we dip it in grease and we want it on the tip of the valve and then we put it in and now that won't fall out so it helps us when we're assembling it now we can put this on there where you get the snap ring so it holds it together and now this snap ring if you notice it has a sharp edge on this side and at this side you can see it's kind of rounded we want to make sure that we put the sharp edge facing out so when it pushes against it it kind of digs in and it won't pop out all the way in get your snap ring pliers on there mmm push it couple times make sure it's seated just like that and now we're good and a little a little trick that I like to do on these late model ones just just to check everything is if you take a little bit of air into that balance hole and you can hear the valve that bow was nice and free and you hear clicking and that's it for the pressure regulator valve installation all right I want to go over one more modification to the case and that is we have to drill a small hole into the case to feed constant pressure into the boost valve circuit in the pump so that we can increase pressure with our p.m. of the engine and it doesn't use the module anymore what we want to do is we want to get a drill bit that is between a 108 and a 114 diameter okay so if we measure the diameter this one's about a 108 or 119 or 109 this one's a little bit bigger 116 115 114 anything like that is fine so what we want to do is tuck that into a drill and we want to connect this passage right here which is pump pressure into this passage right here which is your boost circuit and we're gonna do that by drilling straight down right here directly on top of that hole that comes from the front right there and it's very critical that it be in this exact position if you're doing anywhere else it won't work correctly so we're trying to connect this passage into this passage right here and we're gonna drill a hole through one layer of aluminum right here one layer like that that's it now we would recommend doing this with a transmission apart or if it was in a car of course the chips would be following you'd be upside down which would be great but we're gonna blow these out of here just for the video purposes so what we end up with is one hole right there now we're going to send an eighth inch check ball with this kit so if you wanted to go back later and plug that hole you could take this check ball with a small punch and you drop that down on top of there and then you would just tap it with a small punch down to about flush and that would fix your case and put it back to stock again if for some reason you wanted to go back later now line pressure from the pump is connected to the boost circuit going into the pump and it's going to make the pressure raise and lower with engine rpm just like a manual valve body or a trans brake valve body so next we're gonna go over the installation of the valve body for starters we want to make sure our case is clean it's free of burrs we if you know to be safe we can take a sharpening stone we can go over the case and we can with the with the smooth side and we can go over the case and make sure that there's no burrs anywhere on the case okay now that the case is clean you know we blow it off with some compressed air maybe some brake clean to clean it off make sure it's none of that grit gets inside the transmission so next we want to make sure that if there was any previous valve bodies installed that would create problems with this valve body we want to make sure that we get rid of those things and one of those things is check balls a lot of if you had a trans brake on your transmission prior sometimes they would have a check ball hammer into this passage or sometimes they might plug this passage right here so we want to make sure that these passages have no plugs also transmissions have a harsh reverse and when back in the day they would put a cup plug in this hole here and it would soften up the reverse of the band we want to make sure we get rid of all that stuff no plugs here no plugs in the return here no plugs in the return here once we verify oh that's good and clean you know make sure there's no plugs going through the case for the direct clutch and we're all good now we can start assembling the valve body so the first thing is is we're going to install the modulator in the modulator valve because this goes together just like factoring so we have the valve unmodified we would put that in the case first and it needs to be nice and free so this one we if you take a magnet that we can see that the valve slides in and out nice and free doesn't get stuck and that's what we wants and I would push the valve all the way back in we get the modulator this is a red stripe adjustable modulator with a screw in the back of it it uses a small pocket you know flat blade screw driver to turn it to adjust the shift points okay make sure it has an o-ring on it so we're gonna put that in first we should have some tension on it with the spring when we push it in we get our modulator hold down on our bolt and we'll put that on and that's good modulator is done okay next step is we should put the the rear servo together so there are some things to note on the rear servo so this valve body doesn't use the third gear accumulator circuit anymore which is this circuit right here so with this one at the plate actually plugs it but the circuit second gear oil goes into the servo here and releases the servo when it shifts the second gear so there are some modifications to the servo that we want to do all right next we're going to go over the rear servo piston we want to pull the rings off of it so that we don't get any fluid trapped into the servo with us after we're capping some of these other ports so this piston has aluminum rings on it sometimes they're steel rings sometimes they're teflon rings if they're teflon rings you want to get a sharp pick like this and you can get down in there and you can break it in half and and pop it off but this one's being aluminum we'll just unhook them and we'll slide them off there get them off like that and that's it so now we want to take this put it in the rear servo just like that new lathe cut seal a little bit of blue grease on there the factory return spring will be fine we put that in then we put the gasket on we make sure the covers got no burrs on it everything's nice and flat we like to use a new grade 8 bolts of an inch longer than the factory bolts so you get a little bit more thread and it won't strip the case out so easy so we're gonna get all these started get across so we don't get it all [ __ ] now it's down nice and flat we'll come on do the other ones now we're gonna get our torque wrench and we're going to torque these 15 to 20 foot-pounds so 20 foot-pounds that would be 240 inch pounds on here so we go crisscross pattern that's 240 inch pounds now your rear servo is done all right the next thing I want to talk about is the direct clutch inner lip seal with this valve body we're capping this port and we're all using this port right here for reverse and for third gear so what we want to do is leave that inner lip seal out because the direct drum has an inner lip seal that would go right here and what that is is that's a two-stage piston setup so if we have a lip seal here and a lip seal here and a lip seal on the drum when we put it together we've got two separate circuits we've got one that it uses this supply area and one that uses this supply area so in a higher horsepower application we'd want to take the center lip seal out of the drum and just put one on the outside and the inside and then they would use the entire area of the piston for third gear in Reverse and give you a much more clamping force on your direct clutch pack next thing is we always want to make sure that in the direct drum we have a check ball in the piston or in the drum somewhere so this one has a check ball capsule that's right here in the drum and what that does is when this drum is spinning inside the transmission that check ball is going to unseat and it's going to let what residual pressure is inside here out of the drum if that check ball wasn't in the piston or in the drum then at high rpm in first gear and we're with minish drum is spinning this piston would would apply and it would burn the direct clutch out of it so we will always want to make sure we can have that clutch bleed off completely mandatory to have a check ball in the piston or in the drum or both now the next thing we want to go over is our intermediate band servo this valve body does use the brake band for down shifting to stop the drum from spinning so we want to make sure we put the servo in there so what we have from the factory is this is a factory-style servo setup so it would go on the pin we would have a little c-clip they would slide in from the side and then this would go on top and then the spring would go on and this would go in the bore the only downfall to this style of servo is the way that it's made is when it's in the bore and the pressure comes up it can slide this up and down so there's a lot of travel in that servo when it's installed so we recommend it will work like this but we recommend using the stuff from a4 la de ok so if we took a pin and a piston from a4 la de you can see that it has a larger end on this end and now the piston is made to the pin so the pin moves with the piston so if I take this design and I put this together like this and I put it in there now it's much much better works a lot faster a lot less fluid has to go in to make it release okay now check ball locations this valve body only uses one check ball location and that is in the bathtub right here for our reverse and low-band oils to go feed the rear band we have to have this check ball otherwise we'll have criss-crossing hydraulic passages and that's a no-no the check ball that typically goes on the modulator valve we can leave it out because our plates going to cap the circuit we don't need it all these other check balls are not necessary this valve body eliminates this valve body is all about you know harsh shifting you know big power if we got a car with you know a thousand or 1200 or even 1400 horsepower we want to shift it automatically this valve body will do that so one check ball in the bathtub no other check balls next thing is going to be to put the gaskets on so we use alignment pins to help line our valve bodies basically they're just bolts that we've cut the hex off of took diagram and we cut a slot so we could put a screwdriver in it and we put one right here it doesn't have to go all the way in just got to go on a few threads another one right here those are our two alignment holes for the valve body okay so the next thing we want to do is we want to get our gaskets and you'll see that the gasket here says VB that's the valve body side this one here usually I'll say a C or something that can't hardly see it but we want to make sure that we have the right gaskets on the case side on the case side there are two different gaskets they come in two kits one is a late model with seven Czech balls this is a six Czech ball case so it's going to get the early gasket and you can see right here that's a late gasket and that is a problem how it overlaps those two ports so this is the wrong gasket all right this is the late gasket with a/c this is the early gasket with a c-46 Czech balls so when we tested the late one we had a problem where this passage connected those two channels together that's a major problem the transmission will fail if you use this gasket so we want to make sure we use the early gasket for 6 Czech balls and if we put that on there you can see that there's no no no cross leak it fits perfectly in that channel right there okay so now we put our pins in again we put our separator plate on okay now we have the case gasket installed the correct one the early one on this one we've got the separator plate now we want to do the valve body gasket and the valve body gasket they're all the same all the years no issues there and this valve body does not need the kick down solenoid anymore it's eliminated so you don't even have to put bolts here or anything you can leave that completely off because when you turn the pressure up the kickdown solenoid will actually fail they we've had them break and fall and the pan and then they stopped shifting so we eliminated the kickdown circuit all together the next thing is is this valve body being automatic shift does need the governor to operate the valve body and the governor is this so the control shift points you know rpms like a wide-open throttle if we want this valve body to shift at 6,200 rpm we're gonna have to calibrate this in based off of your application so the tire size the rear gear and the rear end all makes a difference on win this valve body up shifts automatically at wide open throttle so again the modulator will control that up shifting to a certain point this is for fine tuning this is for the coarse tuning of getting it even close so with this governor if this valve sticks now it will make the transmission take off in second or third gear when it's in Drive so we don't want this valve to stick so one of the things that we recommend is putting a filter in the governor feed lines which is how factory is but a lot of people in the aftermarket world and the high performance they eliminate this filter we do not recommend eliminating this filter okay so what we want to do is we want to make sure that we get it into the right passage as well so we want this filter in the passage that feeds the governor so we'll go over that because all this kind of goes together at the same time so the next thing is the manual valve we want to make sure we use a stock unmodified manual valve a lot of times we'll polish it with some you know six to twelve hundred grit just to make sure it's nice and smooth we'll install that in the valve body and to get it ready to put on we take the governor feed tubes we install these into the valve body they're identical tubes so you put one doesn't matter which hole they go in okay just like that and then the governor tube that feeds the governor is the one that goes all the way through into the port that goes to the manual valve so that's going to be this tube so when I put it on it's going to be the tube to the inside so this filter is gonna rest when it's all together just like that so we're gonna put that down in the case like so push it down in there we're gonna grab the valve body holding the manual valve so we don't drop it rotate those back down again and then we're gonna start aligning it on these pins and we're gonna make sure we line that up with the park linkage and these have to go right into the holes we really like to use a plastic end of a screwdriver or something to help get them back and down in there when you're assembling it and that's all the way down now okay so now we want to put the bolts in and it takes two more to go here so we'll put those to the side for right now takes three seven sixteenths head bolts that go right here right here and right here tighten up two of them just a little bit and you should come right out so detent spring lining it up at the hole all right so now we have the valve body installed the next thing we want to do or the last thing we need to do is install the filter okay we recommend using a filter that is not a Dacron material that is a brass screen so to show you what it is if we look at the filter and we look in the hole we see a brass screen and we look here we don't see anything if it was Dacron Dacron can be the yellow fabric or a green fabric you would see it here the Dacron in a performance application will clog very fast so if you used Dacron you have to change it very frequent you can't go for years without changing it this is a brass high flow filter from an Allison Transmission and that's what we're going to use okay next I want to go over the tubes for the filter so if we have a factory shallow pan it's going to use this tube if we have a factory deep pan it's going to use this tube if it's a turbo application or a high horse application that might make some heat we would recommend using a steel tube if you have a deep pan okay this won't collapse with the temperature so what happens is that they get the fluid gets really hot and you we put a rings on here which is the case in the long end is the case in and that's on there and it gets hot it actually reduces the size of the plastic where the o-ring sits and the o-ring now doesn't really touch the case and it just falls in and out of the case so one o-ring from the factory is how it comes we recommend two or even three sometimes depending on the pan o rings to get a better seal so that we don't suck air we suck through the filter not air around that position so to put that in we'll put a little grease on it and then we'll wiggle that down in there now this is factory deep never hit it with your hand it's really sharpening it will cut your hand if you hit this okay that's in now we take the filter with the rubber grommet and we wiggle it down on there a little bit and then we bring it over we recommend using a solid filter spacer and a bolt to hold the filter in position without it wiggling so once we put that on and if it's a deep aluminum pan cast cast aluminum we recommend like sometimes just pulling that filter over our hair like that before we tighten it and then we tighten it now the filters rigid it gives us room on this side to clear the pan we put the pan on and that's it the valve body is installed you

Channel: ATFspeed

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Keywords: atfspeed, TH400, Turbo 400, Turbo Hydromatic 400, automatic transmission, ATF, transmission, valve body, valvebody, install, automatic transmission factory, transmission install, instructional, Turbo Hydramatic 400 Transmission, powerglide, high horsepower, horsepower, manual shift, automatic shift, 3 speed, 3speed, TH 400

Id: qwk5MeRTbpo

Length: 27min 2sec (1622 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 03 2020