10/01/2026
Guys, if you buy a bench built transmission from us please pay attention as this is very important. Make sure the shop or person that installs it knows what they are doing and is honest. We built the customer a very nice 10L1000 and he had another shop do the R&R because our time line on installing it was too long for him. (We pride on treating every customer fair and keeping them in line)
The R&R shop was responsible for installing the converter onto the transmission, installing in the truck, doing all the checks that are on the provided installation checklist and test driving the unit.
We got a call from the R&R shop the following Monday and they told us the transmission was acting weird. We asked them several questions to help diag. Some of the questions were about the installation checklist that was provided. The checklist was not followed at all. They failed to install a pressure gauge to verify line pressure, they failed to make sure the tcm had a stock file in it.(They told us they left the tuned tcm on it during the initial test drive which had a transmission file for a stock transmission and not a built one.) They also failed to install the shorter torque converter bolts that were provided because we were nice enough to let the customer pick up the transmission late at night on our last day of the week, the bolts were left here by the customer and when we got in the shop Monday they had already been installed.
We didn’t hear anything back for more than a month so we assumed everything got worked out. They customer told us he put about a 1,000 miles on the truck and it started rattling from the torque converter area. We advised that the unit needed to be pulled back out by the R&R shop and sent to us for inspection. Another month went by and we finally received the transmission.
We tore the unit down and found the main sealing ring on the input shaft was ripped during the installation of the torque converter by the R&R shop. We were very thorough on doing air checks on every clutch pack to make sure there were no hydraulic leaks and all passed. During disassembly everything came apart the exact way it was supposed to and workmanship was clean. We also had one of the hydraulic upgrades in the pump missing because the R&R shop wanted to do their own diagnostic and didn’t put it back in.
A few days after we got everything inspected and made a parts list we got a nasty and unprofessional phone call from the R&R shop about the transmission. We tried to explain all the findings and they didn’t want to take responsibility for ripping the sealing ring and failing to follow the installation checklist because had it been followed from the beginning the wild pressure fluctuation that they found right before pulling the unit to be brought to us would have been found from the very moment it was installed and this could have been an extremely easier and cheaper fix.
We bypassed the R&R shop and nicely explained to the customer what had happened. We offered to fix the transmission and have the converter repaired for only the price of parts and no labor even though the mistake was not our fault. The customer decided to take the transmission in pieces.
Because of situations like this, we will no longer be offering bench built transmissions except through the several shops that we currently build multiple units for every month and have had not a single comeback. If our R&R waitlist is too long and you still want us to build a unit then it has to been installed by our approved R&R shops.
