Well Hello There Fellow Technicians And Hivers!

Friday we had this Ford Kuga that I was busy tearing down to look for the possible cause of failure.

As I mentioned in the previous post it's an error or fault that we've not yet had and we've done ALOT of the DCT450 transmissions. More than we can count so coming down on one that we don't know or can't pinpoint where the problem is, well let's just say things are problematic then.

We have this thing, if the car enters the shop broken it will leave fixed or working or whatever one may call it but the vehicle will be repaired! Well let me tell you that little motto or slogan has given me and bossman more than a few sleepless nights trying to figure out what the hell can be at fault on a vehicle.

So far we've not found the problem of this DCT450, it doesn't want to stay out of gear. If you switch the vehicle off and put it in park and then try to start it, it wants to take off... If you put it in Neutral and try to start it, it wants to take off.

Now we've already swapped out a valve-body on it, but we have no clue whether the one we fitted is damaged or not. The same problem persisted through out so we decided to pull the transmission and go through all of the mechanicals of the box.

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Taking Off Where We Left.

At first we were just going to peak in through the gaps and see if everything was indeed fine inside the transmission but since then we had a talk and we both thought that it would be wiser to rather open it up completely and then have a proper look, since tearing the transmission up now is a lot easier than having to re-fit it and remove it again for nothing at all.

To have the same problem? Nah.

We had this notion in our head that one of the gears might be seized and that might be the cause of it wanting to constantly pull away right after start.

The first order of business would be to remove the two 8 hexagon ellen key bolts and then pull all three cluster bearings from the shafts before we could remove the casings. I wonder why they built it like that.

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Well there's a lot of space to peek through now but as we said pulling it would be the best option that we have.

We would rather inspect everything under a looking glass rather than saying "Oh well let's see what happens." Besides pulling everything would make it so much easier to clean up afterwards. If there is one thing I absolutely hate to do is rebuild a transmission with oil still sticking to the sides of it or grime still packed up in tight corners.

Fortunately from here on it's fairly easy going!

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These DCT450's are built weird. It's the first transmission that I have ever worked on that has two casings bolted to each other with little 10mm bolts. Like what?

Removing all of the 20 little bolts the casing would become free.

Won't be able to remove it yet though.

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These have hidden bolts! No doubt to make someone break it by accident. Come to think of it I wonder if anyone has been caught with this.

Anyhow it sits right behind the oil splash plate, so you will need to remove that part first. It's the black plastic thing I'm holding in my hand.

Schetchy bastards!

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Never Make Life Hard For Yourself.

Whenever I split a transmission casing from the other half I tend to remove the detents that keeps the gear selectors in place. It isn't always needed to remove them but why have a struggle when trying to remove the casings from each other?

It's only four "bolts" and you'll be able to lift it out with ease rather than having it bite down on the selectors! I mean is it really that much effort after you've done so much to get the transmission where it is now?

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Well this is awkward.

I did mention this is a automatic transmission, didn't I?

Laughs well there are a lot of automatics that are still actually manual builds. It's ironic that you get so many different types of automatic transmissions. There is the CVT's to consider as well, nasty stuff those.

Well she's open,

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Why Did We Go Through All That Trouble?

Well we had to, just to inspect these little pistons.

These are what is actually shifting the selector forks. A very nice concept actually, somewhere a piston is shifting inside the valve-body and it's either opening or closing a channel that has oil pressure and then it directs the oil to the fork on the gear that is next in line.

I did a thorough inspection of them and they all still look good. They fit in quite tightly as well.

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There's more behind and underneath this part of the gear selector. We will have to remove this piece before we can get all of those out.

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You know why I didn't think of removing them first before taking a "clearer" photo is totally beyond me. 😅

Well might be you see them better now.
What needs to happen now is I have to remove the right side part of the gear selectors and then I've got to remove one of the actual forks. The other fork we will need to lift all three cluster shafts. That means everything with a gear on needs to lift about an inch up so that we can get the very last piston out of place to inspect it.

The only problem was that there was no faults on those four pistons either, see now we're heading into a direction where we need to at-least change the fault. Coming up with a solution is tricky here.

Then again it might also be the computer that is buggered on the valve-body. That is the next most likely cause.

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Since we could not find any internal problems, no use in leaving the thing lying there like a heap of hopelessness right? Or should I?

Sometimes I wonder.

Well we closed it up again and now the only possible thing left to do is to start fiddling with the valve-body and the programming of the vehicle. I mean rooting out a programming error is never a good choice, my car had a major programming problem and no matter what we did to the transmission it just would not come right until we got the right software after a huge struggle.

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Dated 24/07/2023

Take note this is not a how to guide, merely myself talking about the work I do and my thoughts around certain things.

To everyone who made it this far into my post Thank you for the read and the support.

If you found this entertaining or educational please consider a re-blog and up-vote.

Most of all please leave a input in the comments below, whether is good or bad critic I would like to know, whether its your opinion or your way of doing things in a different manner I would like.

_{Connecting the people of #HIVE across South Africa. #hive}