i've heard the dodge auto trannys are just plain garbage........ what do i do to get this thing to hold up to a lil abuse, and last. My brother has an '02 r/t and we wanna do a shift kit or something next.

 

What vehicle is it? What motor?
For the most part, shift kits are an improvment, but they reall dont do much for the actual weak spots in the tranny?

 

Seems to me it's pretty obvious it's a 2002 r/t which is a 5.9 with a 46re auto.

And yes the shift kits do extend the life of the tranny quite a bit by reducing overlap and increasing the holding power.

If you want to install the shift kit yourself get the transgo TFOD-HD2, pretty simple install and works extremely well.

www.bulkpart.com has the best prices around

 

thanks man, that's what i wanted. i had no idea what tranny was in it, and if shift kits were the fix, etc...etc... thanks.

 

I install shift kits in Dodge trucks once or twice a week and there are 2 ways to go here. The best kits are Transgo's sktfod and sonnax industries sure cure kits. Both are rather complicated but with reasonable intelligence and extreme patience they will install without problems. If you are willing to pull the unit out, I would go with either, the sonnax kit is really in my opinion more of a heavy duty/towing/heavy hauling type of kit as it contains a lot of lube upgrades for the overdrive section. Sonnax also offers many internal parts to seal up lube circuits, custom made steel valves to replace the coated aluminum factory valves-(PR - TV - and Torque converter clutch shift valves) are included in the kit. If you must install the kit in the vehicle then I would go with the Transgo kit as most of the upgrades concentrate on systems accessible from the pan/valve body. These are not the total answer to beefing these units up as there are many more things you can do to make these units virtually bulletproof. I have many of these units that I have built in trucks that do unbelievably hard work-like a 3500 series that pulls 14 round bales of hay daily, a medium size bulldozer hauler, car haulers, etc. shortly after I was able to see how these trans's acted doing this kind of work, I went ahead and applied our 2 year - 30,000 mile warranty to them and delivered them confidence rather than apprehension. Let me know if I can help you decide what to do on your truck as I have seen it all.