We took the truck to my cousin’s shop today, and I finally got a bit of good news. We rode down the road for all of 5 minutes before he diagnosed the noise we’ve been hearing for a few weeks now. It’s the distributor cap, and that could very well be the whole tranny issue as well. I knew that most tranny problems aren’t actually caused by the tranny but rather by an engine issue that the tranny is trying to compensate for.

If the distributor cap is bad the transmission could be screwing up because the computer is trying to fix what’s wrong. We can’t be absolutely sure that’s what’s going on until we replace the cap, so Hubby’s outside doing that right now.

If that doesn’t fix it our next option is to have the transmission completely flushed. $60 for a flush is better than spending hundreds we don’t have to rebuild it right now if we don’t have to, so I’m willing to try it. If that doesn’t fix it, we have to replace the torque converter because the whole issue is that the torque converter locking mechanism isn’t working correctly. It’s causing the rpm to jump because it’s locking and unlocking randomly at cruising speed.

Worst case scenario we’ll be buying a $163 torque converter, plus the $30 for the distributor cap that has to be replaced anyway, and another $60 for the flush. I’d much rather put $250 into it than a rebuild, and since Hubby’s a shade tree mechanic my cousin didn’t charge us to diagnose the problem and said he won’t charge us for any help we may need with it.

The way I see it that’s about the cost of one night in one of the luxury hotel rooms we’d thought about staying at when we go to Washington, DC and Jersey in May. We wanted to splurge and do something we really never do on a trip, but I’ll give up a night of luxury I don’t need to fix my truck!