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[JimGnitecki]

This is one of those situations that reinforces a few truths I have encountered and re-encountered a few times in life:

1. Things can go wrong despite the best of efforts
2. Multiple bad things sometimes (often) happen simultaneously
3. Warranties are as good as the character of the people who back them
4. There are Angels

Tuesday March 20 seemed like an ordinary day at first. I started work very early and eft early to run a bunch of errands in the SSR. The first 60 miles or so seemed uneventful. Then, driving my supercharged SSR with its Phoenix Transmission built automatic transmission to my son's church meeting, I noticed that the engine rpm was not its normal 2198 at 60 mph - that the rpm seemed to be riding above that, and varying some. Strange, I thought. Never happened before in 11 months of daily driving.

The discrepancy between expected and actual rpm became larger as I tooled around for 90 minutes while my son was at his meeting. Then, after I picked him up and began to drive home, at night, with 63 miles to go, the discrepancy became, over the course of a few miles, much larger. I knew something was wrong, and didn't want to provoke any worse a problem than I already had, so cooled it to 55 mph and VERY light throttle from the highway lights. I noticed that the 1st to 2nd shift was very sloppy, whereas it had been very crisp in the past.

I recalled now how Randy had commented during our test ride after re-installing the supercharger recently, how that 1st to 2nd shift seemed softer to him than it had been. I realized now that something had been going astray inside my transmission, but not being a tranny expert by any means, I didn't know what. I just prayed I'd be able to get home and not be stranded on the highway at night. I did make it, but the engine rpm was in the high 2000s and even into the 3000s at 55 mph for the latter part of the trip, and I watched the transmission temperature gauge climb to about 270.

I called Greg Ducato, owner of Phoenix Transmission early Wednesday morning. Greg listened to the symptoms, reminded me that I have a warranty from Phoenix, helped me make the arrangements to get it transported by flatbed to his shop 218 miles away the next day (Thursday), and said he would get his guys onto it just as soon as it arrived. It was not until later that I learned from one of his key team leaders, William, that Greg was right at that time suffering acute pain as the residual from a harsh hospital stay involving extraction of multiple kidney stones. Any of you, who like me and my wife, have experienced a kidney stone, know that one creates pain that doctors describe as significantly worse than the pain of childbirth. Greg had complications that made his harder. Yet, he personally made these arrangements.

My own situation has been, shall we say, challenging, lately, even before this transmission thing. We have received very abnormally high amounts of rain in compressed time periods here recently, and 3 times now, including during this transmission episode, our septic field has as a result become saturated, rendering the plumbing temporarily unusable. I have also been fighting a persistent multi-day (8 days so far) periodically severe toothache, which my dentist is reluctant to begin a root canal on, because the x-rays simply don't support the root canal theory with the usual evidence expected. We are doing diagnostics, and I am pretty cranky in the meantime. I have needed an Angel, and Greg Ducato, despite his own much more serious pain, has been that angel, taking all the stress, work, and follow-up on the transmission out of my hands.

Several times Thursday and Friday, William, one of his key guys, kept me thoroughly up to date on what was happening. The flatbed driver made the RETURN trip from Phoenix to my home driveway and back in a total of 7 hours (436 miles plus loading the SSR). The flatbed was a costly first rate piece of equipment that I had NO concerns about my SSR being loaded onto. I asked the towing company dispatcher, Melonie, how much this tow would cost. She said that Greg had told her to bill Phoenix. William called me late Thursday afternoon and told me he had waited until the SSR arrived, so he could lock it up inside the Phoenix building for the night.

William kept me posted Friday on the extraction of the transmission from the SSR, and even posted a note on the driver’s window reminding his crew members not to disconnect the battery before first lowering the driver’s window, so that the indexing glass would not tear the window seal if opened without power to the indexing system. First thing Monday, Greg sent me an email explaining what had happened:

“Jim, we are performing surgery on your transmission this morning. It seems our Alto Extra Wide band has a delamination issue and the lining has peeled off like old paint. Everything else looks great so we will be giving it a good cleaning and replacing the band with a Borg Warner High Energy series and making sure everything is perfect then back in she goes this afternoon. I have had two other instance of this happening with the Alto band and we are no longer using them because of these kinds of issues. The slight amount of extra surface does not outweigh the diminished life expectancy these bands are beginning to show. I apologize for the inconvenience but we are working hard to make this right for you so you can have the strong and dependable transmission you paid us for.
Greg”

Did you note the apology included? When was the last time your local GM dealer apologized for the inconvenience caused by a part failure?

Note also that Greg didn’t at any point say “it’s not our fault”, even though it was not. He told me that his supplier on these marginal bands is not helping him out at all on the consequential costs. In the case of my SSR, those costs include removing the transmission (a MAJOR epic), disassembling it down completely (to ensure that Greg and his team knew EXACTLY what had happened to this super duty build), replacing the defective part with a better one, refilling the transmission with synthetic transmission fluid, re-installing the transmission, and road testing by Greg personally. Furthermore, when I asked Greg how much I owed him for the flatbed service, he insisted that Phoenix had already picked that up and that was that. He then apologized again for my inconvenience. MY inconvenience, when Greg himself was suffering some major league medical pain when he arranged to rescue me.

I reminded Greg that the SSR is a very heavy vehicle – 30 to 40% heavier than the Corvettes and Camaros and other performance vehicles the GM automatic transmission is normally used in, whether that transmission is stock or a Phoenix “built” transmission. Those of you who understand vehicle dynamics understand that in every single situation other than steady speed cruising on an absolutely flat highway, this means that the load on the transmission is 30 to 40% higher than it is on those cars. I told Greg how I had done the mathematics on the superficially strange factory-stock GM “torque reduction” percentages applied during shifts, and had realized that their percentage reductions ALL resulted in no more than a calculated maximum of 320 ft. lb. of torque being delivered to the transmission EVER during a shift.

I told him this episode scared me, and I asked him if it would be advisable to regulate even more significantly than GM does, those torque peaks that result during shifts (due to the mismatch between the engine speed and the tranny, multiplied by the torque converter). He firmly said “no”. Phoenix builds these transmissions to take what my supercharged engine, and engines a lot more powerful, can dish out.

He said my 4.56 gearing helped make the load on the transmission lower too. He said my high stall torque converter actually makes things easier on the tranny too. He said the key is to limit the duration of the shifts, to keep them “crisp” and short, so that the “overlap” between gears is kept to a minimum (This is why Greg dislikes the stock GM 1st to 2nd shift so much). He liked what Lyndon had done to my shift speed tables: raised the point at which the transmission shifts under even lighter throttle openings, so that the load of accelerating the vehicle is spread out over more engine cycles per minute and therefore less torque per cycle. Lyndon did that to protect the engine against detonation under low rpm hillclimbing and acceleration, but the tranny benefits too bigtime.

In summary, Greg said it was just a badly manufactured part that caused this failure. He told me the highway rpm and the soft 1st to 2nd shift were a result of this type of failure. He said not to sweat it, and apologized yet again for the insufficient quality of his supplier’s part.

My SSR looks like it is going to be ready for me to pick up Wednesday. Unless Greg calls me to say there is any delay, I am flying to Dallas tonight (Tuesday), and Wednesday morning, my son who is a student at UT Dallas, will drive me to the Phoenix shop in Weatherford, just west of Dallas / Fort Worth. If you don't see me on line until sometime Wednesday evening, when I will be back at home, that's why.

So, let’s go back to my 4 life lessons above:

1. Things can go wrong despite the best of efforts
2. Multiple bad things sometimes (often) happen simultaneously
3. Warranties are as good as the character of the people who back them
4. There are Angels

Specific translation:

1. Even a GREAT team like the Phoenix Transmission team ( and it IS the best I have ever seen) can be sabotaged by a supplier that doesn’t uphold the same quality standards

2. At the same time as this part showed its true inferior nature under pressure, Greg and I both experienced some very trying unrelated problems, but Greg certainly came through his with the finest of character exhibited (William tells me that Greg is normally such a nice guy, and was visibly struggling to stay ungrumpy with all the pain he was enduring)

3. When Greg and his team say you have a warranty, they really MEAN it. They treated me like the shop’s most important job when my tranny failed me, made it all good, swallowed the labor and part costs, and even picked up the towing bill (via a QUALITY carrier – the driver was even a hot rod enthusiast), which I had no expectation of them doing (The way Greg put it, he just HAD to help someone who was “literally in deep s__t” with a saturated septic field and no toilets.

4. There are Angels, and one of them is named Greg Ducato. And he leads an entire TEAM of them (William, Scott, and the rest of you guys at Phoneix: a BIG THANK-YOU).

I have spoken regularly on this forum about the value of buying your goods and services from people you can trust, who spend their time and money supporting this forum, and who see us not as people to sell to, but as fellow enthusiasts with the same excitement about vehicles. People like Greg.

If you are in the market for a high performance transmission build, don’t even stop to think about where to go. Read the above true story, and know for sure that Phoenix is the place you can TRUST, because this team has true character. I know that Phoenix is going to get ALL my transmission business, despite their being 218 miles away. And I view Phoenix’s team as “friends”, because when people rescue me like these folks did, that goes way beyond the expected.

Jim G