Hey all, last week or the week before I was driving to work and my OD light started flashing and then the transmission started shifting horribly. Since I've been referring to explorerforum.com for quite some time now, I thought maybe I'd check out if anyone else was experiencing this flashing OD light problem. And sure enough, tons of people had, and to my discouragement, many said that this means that your transmission is a pile of crap and you have to shell out $1000's to have the tranny shop rebuild it or drop in a pre-rebuilt one. So I checked the other symptoms of a "pile of crap" transmission, and I didn't have any (flakes of metal in the fluid, burnt smelling fluid, no fluid...etc). My transmission was working great (well except for the 2-3 flare which I never really realized was a problem) until something fairly instantaneous happened. So I dug deeper, and finally figured out what transmission I had, and then found this rebuild diary (I have a 2000 XLT, 4.0L SOHC). Upon reading all of the stuff in this diary, it seemed like diving into the transmission before going to the shop could be worth a savings of tons of $. I'm a big fan of DIY as I try to avoid the mechanic as much as possible since I seem to get screwed every time I go to one.
Anyways, I followed this guide, ordered the EPC solenoid, the Ford blowoff valve kit, the revised solenoid bracket, and the Ford separator plate (I did not get the Superior or the Transgo shift kit). A day later the parts I needed were @ the dealer (I also got the intake manifold gasket set as I'm having the rough idle cold start problem as well). That day I took the guts out of the transmission. Surprisingly, everything looked really nice inside. There wasn't any gunky buildup of crap in the bottom of the pan, just a light covering of metal dust (the magnet had a bit more on it, but nothing compared to what I was expecting, a pile of crap tranny). After that I took the valve body out of the transmission, I brought it inside and looked at it for a while before attempting to do anything with it. I was super careful not to disturb the thing at all. I took the solenoid bracket off and the EPC solenoid popped out and one of the shift solenoids fell out too. The old EPC solenoid looked nice and clean and there wasn't any gunk on it or anything, which was a disappointment. However, once I looked @ the shift solenoid that fell out, I was kinda happy cause I found that one of the O rings wasn't an O ring anymore, it was shaped more like an S curve. Somehow the O ring broke. The other O ring on the solenoid was out of it's...O ring "track" as well. So then I looked at the solenoid plate, and sure enough, for that solenoid, the little clippy-thing that holds the solenoid in place was bent back allowing the solenoid to come part way out of its bore. So I'm guessing that after a while the somewhat sharp edges of the valve body bore sliced the outermost O ring and....somehow the other O ring came out of it's "track". Lastly, I removed the separator plate and it looks like someone already did the Ford blowoff valve and separator plate. However, the plate I removed was bowed (maybe from mounting bolt stresses???), and the blowoff valve wasn't the revised Ford one. In the kit I got from Ford, it said to make sure the blowoff valve had a dimple in it's face. The one in my valve body did not have this dimple. Otherwise it was identical (at least as far as I could tell) to the valve I bought. So needless to say, I slapped on the new separator plate and put in the new valve. Oh yeah, the EPC screen and the silver valve/spring were not present in my valve body, again probably confirming that someone already did the Ford fix.
I replaced the shift solenoid as it didn't seem like it was going to be possible to go to Ford and get some dumb O ring for the solenoid. I got some $20 from transmissionpartsusa.com, but when I got the thing, I was rather disappointed with the quality of the 3rd party shift solenoid. It just seemed cheesy compared to the Bosch one I took out. The dealer did want $60 for the solenoid though. Oh well, so I put the cheese solenoid in. Now comes the fun part, putting back in a crap load of valve body bolts. Since I tried to use the diagram Robrike posted a while back for keeping track of which bolts went where, I had a bit of a problem: The bolts I was taking out were not matching up to the lengths that the diagram showed. So I looked at Glacier's post about figuring out which bolts went where, but I didn't exactly want to do that either. I looked on my service manual dvd I snagged off fordcds.com and I found what is in my opinion a much better set of diagrams that showed exactly where each length of bolt went. I have not compared the Ford diagrams w/ the one Robrike posted, but I'm thinking that diagram is incorrect (but then again in most cases I can never trust a mechanic to do anything right so maybe someone else just put the wrong bolts in the wrong holes in the valve body). I do know that the Ford diagrams are correct as the length bolts I was placing into the valve body corresponded to the height of the bolt hole's boss.
So finally I got the whole thing back together w/ a new shift solenoid (the one closest to the TCC), a new blowoff valve, a new separator plate, a new EPC solenoid, a new filter, and a new pan gasket. Oh also of note, I removed around 8 quarts of fluid during this entire process, not counting the amount that soaked into my shirt sleeve, my pants, old rags, and not counting any left over in my collection pan. So I put a bunch of fluid back in (about 6 quarts), started it up, added a 7th, and drove around. Everything now works great! There's no shift flare, no flashing OD light, and no other shift problems.
Basically this whole post is here thanking all you guys (or girls) on here who have posted all this information (along w/ awesome photos), and have willingly given help to those that needed it. You all have instilled courage in me to try and do this job as to me this is a risky task. It's definitely a bit trickier to do than changing brake pads and rotors or even wheel bearings and upper ball joints. So...thank you all again!!
ps-if you want Glacier, I could post a pdf of the thing from the Ford service manual dvd (unless that's against the rules of the forum). If nothing else, it gives a nice list w/ diagrams on how to put the valve body and whatnot back into the transmission. Plus it gives torque amounts for all the bolts except the gold bolts that hold the solenoid brackets on.
Andy