khavel wrote:So its been several months since I posted on this forum, which has helped me tremendously in the past! I was lucky enough to discover this forum with my 05 OR at around 90K miles. It was lucky for me that the car never developed the dreaded strawberry milkshake and I succesfully completed the RAD bypass surgery in my driveway. Its been at least 6 mos since that bypass and I've driven in hot TX weather, towed a light lawn trailer half way across the country without any TRANS heat problems just utilizing the stock TRANS air cooler up front. BUT, yesterday driving up some 15 plus miles of very steep mountain roads in 80 plus degree temps at 5-6K feet up, the PATHY gave out and went into limp mode. I was focusing on the twisty road and noticed everything bogging down, looked at the dash and it was like a Christmas Tree! Luckily had a place to pull over immediantly and let things cool down at idle, pouring some water all over the stock cooler up front to help out. When I pulled the TRANS dipstick, that sucker was smoking! Turned off ignition, restarted, and all lights went off except the Check Engine. Fine the rest of the day, but mostly was downhill after that. A local Transmission shop suggested that I might just take out the stock cooler up front and replace it with a much beafier unit that would help make up for bypassing the one on the RAD? Does this seem OK? Most people are just adding a second one in front of or behind the current factory one, but if you just ditch that stock one and put in one that handles twice the load of the factory one, won't that be just as efficient?? Any thoughts would be much appreciated! Also, I have about 40K on the current TRANS fluid, considering that it heated to the point of LIMP mode, do I need to replace the fluid as well?? AND, will that Check Engine light cycle off on its own now, or do I need to have that cleared as well??
THANK YOU!
any stored codes?
if the problem was indeed an overheated transmission, I'd definitely get fresh fluid in there
if the problem was an overheated transmission due to slow uphill driving, i'd be more tempted to put a new radiator in it (un-bypassed)
external coolers are at their best with good air flow
slow heavy load driving prevents good air flow, no matter how many, or how big they are
adding an additional cooler (one in front of the other) will reduce air flow through both