Inspection of a 904 torqueflite

Yeah, that press and what I don’t know has cost quite a bit in replacement parts and shipping. I added it up last night to the tune of $200 in bushings, shipping, and broken parts.

Tom did say that governor play was excessive and told me to replace the output shaft. It was in his book on page 80, about sealing rings cutting into the reaction shaft support housing and clutch retainer due to excessive end play. Apparently they move back and forth so much it acts like a saw over time and creates fine aluminum dust on the back part or cast dust on the front part. I’ve got so much in this I wasn’t leaving anything to chance. The play I had was in the governor housing and heavily wearing the output shaft support. There is no spec on this endplay in the atsg and it would not affect endplay for the whole transmission. Just the governor housing because once it’s locked with the snap ring it’s basically stand alone. The snap ring was checked and correct. A shim could have been put behind the governor but it would have been better to replace the whole shaft.
The ......sealing rings.....output shaft support....and output shaft were replaced.

On the bushing in the reaction shaft
I might try to hammer the next bushing in instead of using the press. Just have that one last bushing to get right. There has to be a reason it’s buckling so bad.

At least they are easy to get out now. I’ve got 4 more sitting here.
This is the third one taken out and the second one I trashed with the same buckling problem.

The first one I thought was a fluke and maybe just bad luck. The second one....it’s going to be a consistent problem so I’ve got to figure out why.

I’ll rebuild a few more of these at different points. The curve was worth it and $200 isn’t much to gain that experience. Plus all the extra servos and shift kits. The frictions and steels in the 999 were good...almost new. I replaced them anyway.
WIT trans has been a great source.. cobra had some hard parts as well. Transpartsusa was ok. Decent prices......slow shipping.
The rest were google searches that landed me on eBay for some of the harder parts. Rat rod al on here had a spare 904 in pieces he sold me a bunch of misc parts from a 67 904. Couldn’t use most of them but in the end. He sent that parking pawl spring and the trans bolts with the filter bolts I needed to finish it up.

After this is done. I just have a rebuilt 904 with with a tfsc kit and no real purpose sitting around. I built it for the experience and it came in very handy for comparison. The 67 parts as well were different on the reverse apply. They have a strut.....my 76 904 doesn’t.

I ended up with the design progression from the
older 904 ......4/3 .......6” shell with reverse strut
Middle 904 .....4/4......6” shell with reaction pin
And the 999 5/4........6 1/8” shell

I think mid 90s had an even wider shell. Like 6 3/8”

So this wasn’t just a learning experience in hard and soft parts and terminology. It had a lot of hands on design stuff as well. I took it slow and worked on it in spare time.

We will just have to see now how it actually functions when it’s done.