'69 International Scout Part V - Transmission & Winch Rebuild

It's not rocket science.

It's not even brain surgery. Mm. That looks good.

No, it's rebuilding an automatic transmission. We'll take the mystery out of clutch packs and hydraulic pumps. Plus how to make an old winch run like new. So, sit down and have a snack. It's time for Xtreme 4x4.

It tastes like cat food. It really does.

There was a time not too long ago when we used to fix things and I mean, everything. If you had a toaster that stopped toasting your bread, you'd take it down to the small appliance repair shop and they'd fix it. You take it home and use it for a few more years. Nowadays, we don't do that anymore. If our toaster breaks the TV won't turn on or the oven won't heat up your frozen pizza. All you do. You just throw it away.

Go buy a new one. Now, we as off Roaders know the benefit of rebuilding things instead of replacing them, we do it all the time. And the nice thing is if you can fix things with your own two hands, no matter what the economy does, you will always have more money in your bank to spend on other parts for your rig. And today we're gonna look at two areas where you can save a lot of money by repairing instead of replacing

an area that people sometimes neglect to think about saving money when rebuilding is with a winch. Now, we picked up this used Warren 8274 winch for just under $200. And it's a great example of what you can get. If you buy a used winch, they didn't even make this winch anymore. It's out of production, but it's a high quality winch with an 8000 pound line pole and it will look great on the front of our scout 800. Now, obviously, the first thing we have to do to rebuild this is tear it all apart.

Every winch will come apart differently. Now, Warren does have exploded view diagrams available for all their models to help you with, tear down and rebuild.

Just remember to keep everything organized neat and tidy

with all the electrical solenoids removed, we can focus on the motor

and we'll remove the braking assembly

and finally separate the gearbox hats.

Now, the key to keeping the cost of your rebuild a lot lower than replacing the actual item is to only go in and repair what has failed or what could possibly wear out. And the nice thing about the Warren family of winches is you can get a service kit for almost every single component inside the winch. Now, our winch was in very good working order. So we're just freshening it up. The first thing we're gonna replace is this lower drum seal right here. It's what seals the gearbox and keeps the oil from leaking out and onto the drum. If that oil leaks out from this gearbox, it'll starve our gears for fluid and possibly cause more costly repair down the road. So, since we have the winch apart, it's just a good thing to replace this small item. The other wear item we're going to take care of is this braking assembly right here? Now, this is what slows the winch down. When you let of the trigger, you can see these little clutch packs right here. They're kind of worn out. So we got a complete brake rebuild kit from Warren to replace both the wee items as well as the balls and any bushings inside.

Now, our electric motor works fine. So we're not going to do anything with it, but we will replace the solenoids as well as the electrical cables and a new solenoid cover just to dress everything up. All we have to do now is put our winch back together

with the winch freshened up on the inside. We can dress up the outside with a coat of primer

and finally some flat black.

The most common area of electrical failure in a winch are the solenoids themselves. The con

can become burned and will not energize. So for good measure, we're going to replace all four.

If we bought this winch brand new, it become pre spooled with some aircraft cable on it, but we picked it up, used with an empty drum. So we're gonna take advantage of that empty drum and upgrade right now to some winch rope. Now, ours comes from Master

Pole. It's a 21,000 pound rated synthetic winch rope. Now, the synthetic rope does have a couple of advantages over the aircraft cable. It is a lot lighter, so it's easier to carry up and down those hills. If you drop it in the water, it'll float, it won't sink down deep into the mud. And if it does ever break, instead of whipping back at you, it'll just fall to the ground nice and safe and it attaches to the drum just like standard cable.

The synthetic rope is loaded onto the drum by energizing the winch

and to make the roller fairly work on our winch, we're going to use a kit from day stock. It changes the rollers over from metal to a composite to guide the cables and prevent

chafing.

So there you go for the cost of a couple repair parts and throwing in a few upgrades. We have a better than new worn 8274 winch classic style, but all rebuilt and ready to pull our junk out when it gets stuck. It's gonna look great on the front of our little scout, but this is not the only item we're gonna rebuild today.

1200 bucks to pay a mechanic. What Ian's gonna show you how to do for free rebuilding an automatic trance. That's next.

Now, there is no area where you'll save more money by rebuilding. Instead of replacing than your transmission, you take your truck to the shop and just get a stock rebuild. It's gonna be 2500 to $3500. If you buy a crate transmission with all the best parts in it to handle the power wheeling, that's gonna cost around $4000 and you still got to put it in.

You can get everything you need to build a bulletproof transmission for under 1000 bucks. And the first step obviously is to take it out of the truck.

Now, the transmission we're gonna rebuild is the 700 R four GM has used these transmissions from the mid eighties all the way up today in a different form. And they're really popular with street rotters as well as off roaders, mainly because they have four forward gears. So you get an overdrive for the highway, but they have a lower first gear ratio than almost any other automatic out there. So they're great for crawling. The newer version is called the four L 60 E and it's easy to identify because it has this large round plug on the side of it. Now, the downfall of this transmission is, it needs a stand alone computer to operate or it will not shift at a second gear. And that's why we chose the 700. It is a non computer controlled transmission easy to spot in the junkyard because it will have this kick down cable that travels down and hooks up inside the valve body,

no computer to run, it just bolts up behind the motor no matter what transmission you're gonna rebuild. The first thing you're gonna wanna buy is a good manual. Now, a great series of manual are the Haines tech book manuals. And we picked this up from o'reilly auto parts. It has full step by step procedures for rebuilding a whole series of automatic transmissions and it will make your rebuild a lot easier. First thing we have to do,

drain the fluid

with the pan removed, we'll pull off the lock up solenoid,

followed by the valve body

spacer plate

and the check balls,

the clutch assemblies

disassemble the planetary gear set,

then it's off to the parts cleaner

to get cleaned up inside and out.

Some of the stuff we're gonna show you today is very specific to the 700 R four. And other things we show you pertain to any transmission. Rebuild, your number one enemy during a rebuild is gonna be misorganization and dirt. You can see we have everything laid out here exactly how it came out of the transmission and we're gonna clean it thoroughly to do that. We're gonna be using a lot of break clean

and some good quality shop towels. If you just grab some paper towels out of the house and went in here and cleaned your valve body up, you're gonna have LINT build up on all the sharp edges inside here that lint can get jammed up in the valve body and cause it to burn up when you put the transmission back together. Another good thing you're gonna wanna have on hand is a good source of compressed air and a blowgun.

Yeah.

Why am I cleaning this transmission with a blow gun

to show you the incredible power of compressed air

miss you, Billy

with everything cleaned. We can begin our rebuild. Now, there's two ways you can go here. You can just go into your transmission and replace what's worn out. The same thing we do with our winch and you'll end up with a good transmission for your project or you can upgrade it and make it truly bulletproof. Now, that's what we wanna do because we wanted to be able to survive the rigor of off road wheeling. Now, we started by picking the

donor transmission. If you want to build a bulletproof 700 you need to look for the K series case. Now the K is embossed upon the bell housing and the K series transmissions came behind four wheel drive pickup trucks, usually with V8 engines. The aluminum is actually a little bit thicker in certain areas. So we know the case will be able to handle the abuse of off road. Now, I just got to take care of the parts in it

today. On extreme, we're taking a step by step approach to rebuilding a couple items on our rig showing you that not only can you save a little bit of money, but you can actually make it better than it was brand new by upgrading them along the way. Our transmission is completely tore down, cleaned up and ready for rebuild. So we're ready to throw some parts at it. Now, the one drawback to rebuilding a transmission is sometimes you don't know exactly what you should be upgrading. Well, the nice thing is monster transmission has put together a complete kit to solve all those problems. They include every single possible upgrade for your model of transmission in one box and they call it the monster in a box kit. Ours comes with heavy duty red al

clutch disks as well as a stronger band and cole

steels. The planetary gear sets are upgraded from the factory units from four planets in the carrier to five in both the upper as well as the lower planetary gear set. Now, the one area in the 700 that can fail. Very right

is the sun gear shell. So they've included a beast, sun gear shell that is a lot thicker. So it engages with the clutch pack with more teeth and more, more power can be transmitted down to that lower sun gear. It also has smaller windows so it doesn't deflect as much. We have new sprag roller clutches that have more rollers in it. So it actually holds it a little bit tighter. And then obviously all the gaskets and seals that we're gonna need now resist the urge to open up all these bags and just dump all your gaskets, the seals out on the bench to have a look at it.

The bags will keep them clean during the rebuild and some of them even have exploded view diagrams that'll help you when you're putting your transmission back together. Now, if there's one drawback to rebuilding your own transmission and that is a lack of special tools every now and then you're gonna need a special tool no matter what. Now monster transmission, now gives you the option to include special tools in your rebuild kit for your particular transmission model. So you've got no excuse to rebuild your junk.

Now, we always rebuild the transmission working on the sub assemblies. We wanna start with all the planetary gear sets. But before we do, I want to show you one important thing as to why we always keep everything in order as it comes out of the case, these little flat roller bearings are all throughout your planetary gear set and they can very easily be put back on

upside down. I've done it. In the past, I've pulled out this exact part, out of a 700 lifted it up, had the bearing fall out just like that. And then you do not know which way it goes back in. You guess, rebuild the whole transmission, you don't find out that it's in backwards until you try to put the pump on. That's why it's important to pay attention when it comes all apart.

See, I learned from out of state

goes that way.

The next sub assembly we'll work on will be the clutch packs. Be sure to lube. The new lip seals generously with assembly lube

and use the special sealed alignment tube to keep the lip seal down on the inside of the piston.

A thin feeler gauge is used on the outer seal.

Then the clutches and steels are replaced with the new one

after they've been sold through some royal purple synthetic A TF.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The last step is to air check the pistons with the blowgun.

Then the clutch assemblies go back into the case.

This will take a little bit of wiggling.

Oh yeah.

Once all the clutch discs are lined up,

the band goes in

one area of concern in the 700 is always going to be the front pump assembly. Now, depending on the year of the model of your transmission, some of these pumps had a lower vein count. Now that could result in low pressure or even premature failure of the pump. So with our monster transmission kit, we got a new heavy duty pump as well as all the blades and the guide pins for it. Now, we do have the modern uh 10 blade rotor in here, but we're gonna go ahead and swap it out just for good measure.

Now, the Corvette Servo can be installed into the case.

The Corvette Servo applies the band faster

and you'll have a firmer harder shift.

See

with our transmission assembled, it's time to focus on the valve body. Now, from the manufacturer, valve bodies are designed with restrictions in these fluid passages. Now, these restrictions are designed to give you a nice soft, smooth shift as you're driving. The problem with that is those clutches are actually

to do that and we don't want that. So we're gonna install a shift improver kit that came with our monster transmission overhaul system. Now, the thing with the shift improver kit is it'll remove those little restrictions, give you a firm hard shift every single time, make your transmission last a lot longer.

Our shift improver kit has us replacing five different springs in the valve body,

plugging an orifice in the accumulator housing

and changing the springs,

drilling out the valve body spacer plate

and finally eliminating some of the check balls

and we can reassemble the valve body to the transmission

to

it down

and bolt up the pan.

And the last step to reboot the 700

will be cleaning and reinstalling the governor

and the cover.

So today we took two used items, rebuilt them, made them better than new. Both our winch and now our 700 R four transmission. Now it goes without saying guys, when you put it back in the truck, adjust your throttle valve to the specifications and install a good aftermarket cooler because you want this transmission to last the life of your truck. Those two things will keep everything good inside. Now, the toaster, we couldn't just throw it away since today we were rebuilding stuff. So I went ahead, fixed the outside and now it's good as new

ha

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