What would wrong TC feel like?

joenintiesc

Registered User
Say, for example, when my AOD was rebuilt the trans shop put a "non-SC" torque converter in? I thought I'd remembered reading here (I'm pretty sure it was a post from the resident TC guru Alan) that appearance wise you cannot tell the difference between an SC specific TC with the corect stall speed (1800-2000) and a T-bird non SC TC with a lower stall speed (1500?)

So if the shop put the latter torque converter back in instead of the correct one, what would that feel like in an SC?
 
It will have a little less get up and go on takeoff. Chances are if you got a remanufactured stock converter it was the wrong one. No companies that I know of seperate them and the high stall ones are rare.
Alan
 
Dirtyd0g said:
It will have a little less get up and go on takeoff. Chances are if you got a remanufactured stock converter it was the wrong one. No companies that I know of seperate them and the high stall ones are rare.
Alan

Dog glad you responded because I have some inside info from Ford that I'd like to either dispell or confirm from your experiance. I was told that the stck converters put into the AOD SC's are stck 302 converters as evidenced by the swirl pattern of dimples on the outside of the converter housing. Could that be true? I was also told that the NA 3.8 engines with AOD's had the higher stall speed to better match there lower torque. Most people understand that the more torque an engine makes the converter will stall at a higher RPM, in other words a dimpled converter may stall at 1300-1500 RPM on a 302 but that same converter on a SC engine because of its much higher torque will cause that same converter to stall at 1800 to 2000 RPM. That does sound logical, but is that what Ford did with the converters on AOD SC's? Everything I'm finding infowise from all the tranny and converter people is confirming that info. When talking to any tranny or converter shops(such as B&M,TCI or Pro Torque) the first thing they ask is do you have the dimple converter? I have a particuliarly difficult task in choosing a converter for my SC(because of some very unique mods) and right now I'm not sure what to believe as far as what my starting point was on my stck converter. I do know that before I tore the car down my converter was stalling at about 1900 RPM. However once I got the tranny out I found that the converter is balloned very badly so I'm not sure if that effected the stall or not. Can you help clear any of this up so I can tell what I was actually starting with?
 
There is no external way to tell if you have a 1500-1800 or a 2000-2200 converter you have to cut it open to be sure. I original thought the higher stall units were supercoupe only, Then I have pulled a few supercoupes that did not have it. It's one of those deals when you have a factory freak you know why, because it has the higher stall converter. Ballooning does not affect the stall speed unless the fins come loose. These converters balloon terribly, but honestly until it is really bad it doesn't hurt them because the direct drive damper doesn't move like the front cover. I guess it's one of those things you have to see to understand. I have no clue what you are talking about on the dimple converter. As far as I know you can only see 2 different variations externally from the 3 different aod cores. The low stall ones are straight fins. The 2 different high stall ones have pitched fins. All of them have dimples where the fins are stamped in.
Alan
 
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