Getting Connected (And Staying Connected)

Written By - Ron Clark, Valve Body / Solenoid Tech Director

Being the technical director for the valve body and solenoid department, I’ve seen more than my share of errors and mistakes that have been made by people while working with automatic transmissions. The majority involves electrical components, and a majority of those involve the connectors in some way. Often damage to a connector is done during the disconnection process. We’ve all been told not to wiggle a connector to get it off; that can expand the female pins in the connector, and cause them to have poor, or no connection when plugged back in, i.e. 604’s. Also connectors can have special problems we need to watch out for, such as inserts that may come lose from the solenoid block and stay in the harness connector, like the early E4OD in (figure 1).