Just got a chance today to drop the pan to see what was causing my 80 to whine and start slipping. What I found in the pan was a whole lot of grey metallic paste with very little particulate. (see first two attached pics) After blowing on the spout of the filter, I released a bit more particulate from it. Some had a bronze color to it but mostly was dark grey like the rest of the pan. (see second two attached pics). FWIW, the fluid on the valve body was clean as a whistle, even after cycling it thru the gears to release trapped fluid in the valve body.
Just wondering if this is trans clutch material or converter clutch material or something different all together.

 

Is that what it looks like when a trans ***** itself?

 

Not sure how the fluid coming from the valve body could be clean as a whistle by the looks of the pan. I would suspect with your wine you are having a pump failure or the pump is being starved of fluid because of the debris in the filter. Looks like it needs to come out and be gone through either way. Vince

 

That's what I suspect too Vince but I would like to have an idea of what the root cause of all the debris is. From my past 60 experiance, hard part failures cause this much metallic paste but also leave significant amounts of good sized particulate and solid debris. My converter clutch has carbon metallic linings so that is what I suspect rather than an actual trans part failure.

 

Did you rebuild the transmission or put a used one in there? The black looks like clutch material, while there does appear to be some tiny hard part material.

 

Low mile (supposedly only 3000 miles) out of the bone yard that I slapped a Transgo HD-2 kit in before install. The fluid was clean when I dropped the pan to install the shift kit.

Are the stock trans clutches carbon metallic?