Currently my car is in the shop getting the 3.12 pulley installed along with the SAFC2. I also dropped the L-tuned Exhaust for the HKS Hyper. Before any of this stuff was done I felt as though my transmission with 20k on the ODO was sitting at redline to long. What I mean is when the car is under boost and going from 1st to 2nd and 2nd to 3rd....The car would not shift quick enough and also did not put the speed down to the ground quick enough. Last night I thought long and hard about this and said that I must be crazy to up the power and leave the tranny alone. BTW I have the RMM T/C a.k.a "Level 10".....So today I called level 10 directly after reading an article about the full race tranny they have in the Autocross Team Lexus GS. I told sam what was done to the car and said if I go full race tranny will the power actually to the rear wheels still be cut by 20% due to the tranny. He said "NO"..Should only loose about 10% and you will most definately see more power to the rear wheels on the DYNO.

My question is this do you beleive that 10% is the only loss and secondly does anyone have experience in going with a full race tranny. BTW the price on this tranny is $3000 and its warrantied for 6 months unlimited miles.

John

 

J,

PM a member named GadgetSC, he has that seriously built turbo SC that I told you about, I'm not sure but I THINK his tranny is still stock, and he lets off the gas while the car is shifting, kinda like he is driving a stick, the car moves **** man!!

PM him, he is pretty knowledgable on the engine/tranny stuff!

 

I also talked to Sam over at Level 10 today about my tranny feeling like it is slipping before it shifts on WOT just as it hits the rev limiter.

He said it sounds like I need a new tranny since it has 70K miles on it.. Since I already have their valve body upgrade he said it would only cost me $2,600!!!

Still, I'm not sure if I want to take the leap into getting the full race tranny if I'm not positive that is the problem with my car.
With my luck, I'd spend the money, get the tranny and my car would still shift the same.

From what I'm hearing with everyone else having the same setup as me, but with A LOT less miles on their cars, is that they're having the same problems so I'm not too convinced yet about getting a whole new tranny.

 

jcramair,

i've got the rmm s/c with the 3.33 (switching to the 3.12 pulley in a couple weeks). i had level 10 rebuild my tranny about two years ago and did not notice a significant difference at all. i recently went through another tranny rebuild about 5 months ago (t/c failed) - i got the level 10 kit for this rebuild and the owner of the tranny shop where i had the work done was not impressed. this is a guy who builds trannys for all types of race cars. so i've got the 3.33 pulley, precision industries t/c, rmm exhaust, safc2 and a level 10 tranny and when xs-engineering tuned my car on the dyno, it put out 326 hp to the rear wheels and 299 ft/lbs of torque.

so have your tranny pulled out, ship it to level 10, wait a week or so, pay $3k, and you'll still not shift the way you want it to. pretty much everybody with forced induction on a gs has this shifting problem at wot - some of us learn how to let off the gas a little at the right moment. basically someone has to learn how to reprogram the tranny computer. mo at srt has been talking about a tranny ecu for sometime, but to date there is nothing released - hopefully they will put something out that works.

 

John,
I just PM'd you also on this also. Trust me, the shifting issues are probably about 90% solved by the valve body upgrade. Before i had it done I had to shift literally 5 to 7 hundred RPMs early, just so it didnt bounce off the rev limiter. It actually took the tranny that long to slide into the next gear. After the valve body upgrade it goes almost immediately. The problem is the ecu cant "keep up" with the tranny with the SC, the rpms just go to redline too damn fast. That is one reason why they say we should be running the stock gears over the 3.76 gears when running FI.

 

Guys I appreciate all of your feedback and also saving me $3k on nothing. I sometimes can't fathom how I put so much into this GS to only acheive 3??hp at the rear wheels. It sometimes makes me want to give up on the HP thing with my Lex. The worst part about this all is that I can go out tomorrow and buy a brand new E55 and CL55 etc......But I won't becuase I want to be different and do not want to sell out on my "GS"..There is something about this car that makes me attached to it, sometimes more so than my Turbo....oh well tomorrows another day and time will tell

 

I would do a search on level ten, I read alot of bad things about them on supraforums.com

http://www.supraforums.com/forum/sho...ight=level+ten

Plenty of more stuff if you read the other threads when searching for "level ten"

 

Aliga thanks for the info man...That is very interesting stuff. I am staying with my tranny at stock mode and when it goes I will deal with it then, maybe by that time I will have an 05GS

 

np, don't want cl members getting burned!