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What does it take to kill an AW4?

Y

yossarian19

NAXJA Forum User
Location
Grass Valley, CA
Let's assume that the trans is plumbed to an adequately sized cooler & kept at 170-180*.
How much input torque / horsepower will an AW4, stock, reliably hold? Guys are putting them behind AMC V8's because it's the only AMC-pattern bellhousing you can find with an overdrive attached. I'm picking up an SJ and this sounds like a likely mod int he future but... the 360 makes a lot more torque than the 4.0 or the 2jz attached to the A340.
I know somebody with a turbo, supercharger, stroker or (?) has some input here, right?
 
If it's an AMC 360 from the 80s, I would highly doubt it makes that much more torque than a 4.0. Definitely less HP. My guess is the 360 probably makes somewhere around 260 lb/ft. Most of the 80s V8s were smog junk.
 
I've run several AW4s behind strokers. I've broken everything else, but the transmissions just won't die.

I've got a Golen stroker in my street jeep with about 25k on the stroker, and a home built stroker in my off roader. Probably 8k miles. Neither has given me a problem.

I'd be more concerned about the weight of the vehicle going into an SJ.
 
I have the aw4 behind my stroker. Made 225 ft/lbs on the chassis dyno. I got stuck and was rocking it in low. Back and forward. Lots of high revs ( ended up killing my 30k mile stroker) the worst that happened is it got hot and started slipping. I let it cool wile I got pulled out. Fired up and drove home. Not even dirt in the fluid. Just keep a clean filter and fluid and keep that magnet In the trans pan clean and it should last.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I've killed 2
Both where a good bit my fault. (Loosing a trans cooler line bouncing off the revlimiter in low and getting water in the fluid.)

Sent from my 0PJA2 using Tapatalk
 
Boostwerks.com said:
I killed mine at roughly 140,000 miles with the turbo setup (about 20K or so boosted). If it had the transgo shift kit I'm sure it would have been fine however. The kit came out just a few months after I killed it (of course).
Click to expand...

How was that shift kit to install?

Did it make the trans shift so much harder that maybe my wife wouldn't like it in her XJ?
 
lawagoneer said:
Stock AW4's are good to about 450 ft/lbs torque.
Click to expand...

Maybe with a valve body upgrade. Completely stock it will hold for a little while. Good luck getting more than a few thousand miles out of it though. The problem being that the shifts are too soft which allows considerable slip between gears. Ask me how I know. ;)
 
We went through 4 or 5 when we first built 4643, before we discovered two things:


1) stick to aisin solenoids, don't replace them with a rebuild kits.

2) your cooler is not big enough, period.


With replacing our solenoids with junkyard ones and throwing a $600 cooler on the aw4, we have 3 years of abuse on an aw4 (with shift kit) that has been super reliable, behind a huge stroker, slamming a 5000 pound car into the ground and shock loading it approximately every 8 feet.

Mind you, it did finally fail, but it was a mechanical failure of the shifter assembly that probably comes from abusively throwing it between gears with reckless abandon. If I jiggle the shifter long enough to get it to shift into gear, the actual spinny bits still work awesome.
 
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