Reposting this from the Transmission forum because it's sort of urgent and I'll get more exposure here.
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1998 Regal GS, Stock with an intake. 88,000 miles.
These issues started one night after I was joke racing my friends Evo, as I left the parking lot I mashed it off the line, spun the tires and ended up getting some wheel hop as I progressed through the parking lot. I was going to let off as I usually NEVER burnout or anything in a FWD car but for some reason I didn't. So we get to racin, low 1st gear roll, punch it, spin tire a bit and on the 1-2 shift it went past where it normally shifts (Didn't have Perf. Shift engaged) and banged hard into 2nd gear, actually kind of like a grind I suppose. I like crisp and hard shifts but this was not a good one of those. It does that every time I go WOT 1-2 but when I have Performance Shift engaged it shifts with no problems. 2-3 WOT is fine in either mode.
Also it will NOT spin the tires from a roll anymore, when it was stock it would light the tires up for pretty much any 1st gear kickdown but now won't at all. Although that may be attributed to my ghetto short ram intake instead of a FWI, I would go back to stock but I broke the stock air box taking it out. Probably putting up an insane KR number now...
Here's a video of 25-110 the night I was going to put the intake on but ended up breaking the air box and had to unfortunately put the cone filter straight on the TB. Yeah I know, horribad, but I had no choice.
YouTube - 1998 Buick Regal GS 25-110
So to the Converter Lockup problem I've been having. This also started right around the same time, not 100% sure if it was right when the 1-2 problem happened or not, but it's close...
Cruising at any speed when the converter is locked will almost always result in the rpms jumping aka the converter locking and unlocking rapidly and will only go away if I go 0% throttle or jab it a little to get a kickdown to 3rd. The thing that has me bothered is it's not a consistant thing, for instance, this weekend I took a trip to Washington DC from CT and I made it almost 100 miles before the tranny started acting up and I was creeping towards 29mpg so this pissed me off! It continued to **** with me all the way to DC or 250 miles worth of annoyance. I checked the tranny fluid multiple times just to be sure and the level is perfect, fluid is just slightly turning dark but still has plenty of redness to it and smells like old tranny fluid.
One thing I did notice is that my tranny is holding gears, it hasn't done that until this trip, which is its first long trip btw. I have no slip, just holds each gear then shifts normally into the next. WOT still provided great shifts, assumingly due to the increased line pressures??
On the way back apparently it decided that it was done with lockup completely because it just stayed in 4th gear (2500rpms @70-75mph) and only engaged lockup 2 times in 200 miles before I parked it for the night at a hotel. It would drop into lockup, jump around a bit and then back into 4th and have no problems. The rest of the way back today was pretty much lockup-free too, although for about 10 miles it did stay in lockup totally and then just decided it was done with lockup and came back out again.
I was planning on ordering a shift kit and filter from Triple-Edge Performance tomorrow anyways so if that's going to alleviate or at least help these problems somewhat, that'd be great!
One other weird thing is I got the VC gasket recall finally done on Tuesday along with an oil change, picked up my car and drove 150 miles round trip to look at a car for my girlfriend and had absolutely ZERO issues with lockup and it was mostly highway driving too. The next day though it immediately screwed up and shot down all hopes of GM working some magic voodoo into the car. lol
