05 mountaineer - just lost reverse, broken band, solenoid or something else?

[wallyw]

This forum has been an amazing education so far.
I have a 2005 mountaineer v6, only 59k miles, that has been having the hard shifts for a while with o/d light coming on indicative of the servo bore issue. Foolishly I ignored it for too long since I only drive this vehicle 1-2x/week.
Recently it lost reverse. Reverse will rev in what sounds like short cycles but nothing moves.

I'm worried it's a broken band, but it does have manual 1 and 2 just fine. I'd seen some discussion that if the reverse band is broken manual 1/low won't work? All the drive gears work but the rpm's get high and it struggles to shift into 3rd and overdrive and drops out of overdrive sometimes.
Is there a way to diagnose a broken band just through the band adjustment bolts? Or do I need to drop the pan and pull the servo pin to inspect the band?

Basically I'm trying to figure out if I should just swap the solenoid pack and/or valve body as a preliminary step or go straight to a shop for a rebuild to fix the band and whatever else may be wrong. It seems like most shops want to just do a rebuild and not do honest diagnosing. I tried one shop and ran away when they claimed "the car computer shows the band is broken" without doing any other diagnosing.

It is throwing the following codes:
P0795 - fault - pressure control solenoid c
P0775 - pending - pressure control solenoid b

P0731 - gear 1 incorrect ratio
P0732 - gear 2 incorrect ratio
P0734 - gear 4 incorrect ratio
P0735 - gear 5 incorrect ratio

Any guidance much appreciated!

 

[JK080]

The best thing to do is to have it rebuilt, it sounds like it may have more than one problem that would require it to be removed and dismantled. You could pull the pan and have a look around but it sounds like the trans will have to come out.

Those gear ratio codes make me think of problems with the overdrive planet and the no reverse could be the low band or the failure of the direct clutch also no 3rd could be a broken intermediate band or servo.

 

[BrooklynBay]

You could test the low/reverse band with a phillips screwdriver to see if it has spring action. It's much tougher than the other bands so it's unlikely that it's broken. Did you test the bulkhead connector or the internal wiring harness from point to point with a continuity tester? From the numerous threads that I've come across over the years, it seems like these transmissions develop issues when they reach 60K miles. Those issues are the servo bores wearing down, valve body gasket, and the solenoid block.