mtsubie

Problem solved. TCM from a legacy fixed everything, so it looks like we were sold the wrong tranny.

It held steady. I will check again when I get the car back in a couple of days.

Can't give you numbers (if that's what you're looking for) because my mechanic is hanging onto the car for a couple more days troubleshooting it in his spare time. I can tell you that there isn't a surge in rpms that I recall. Day 1 after the first swap I paid close attention to this and saw no surge whatsoever. Latest data is showing that the torque solenoids for 1st to 2nd and 2nd to 3rd are opening for just a little too long. This definitely coincides with the sudden loss of power during the shift.

Thanks for the reply and info. Seeing that the mechanic has now done the transmission R&R on this twice, I would hope he would have caught something like this but if it is a crack it could easily be overlooked. After paying for one used tranny and labor for install twice, I just want a car that will stay on the road another 100k. If anybody else has even heard of symptoms like this, I'd love to hear about it. Symptoms do not manifest with gentle, normal acceleration just with hard acceleration. The hesitation is more abrupt when the tranny is cold but that makes sense to me I guess. I absolutely never experienced anything like this before the original tranny was replaced.

About 122k on the 2.5L engine. I've had it for a little over 2 years and put the last ~33k on it. Not really had a tune up per se, but I have had it in for major servicing including the timing belt service. You think this could have something to do with loose vacuum/breather hoses?

I just had my auto-transmission replaced in my '02 Outback because the diff was screaming like a banshee (and getting worse). The replacement is a used transmission freighted over from Japan with roughly 45k miles on it. Everything seemed normal until I accelerated hard (like getting onto the highway) and then the shift from first to second and second to third included a sudden and severe drop in power for about a second at the most. It felt as though all power to the drive train was gone and then suddenly came back. At first, I thought that maybe this was a quirk I could live with as I don't really drive the car that hard, but after a couple of weeks decided that I had experienced the symptoms more often than expected and that we needed to replace the replacement. The short of it is that the second replacement has been installed and has the exact same symptom. I never experienced this with my old transmission, just the whining differential, so though it would seem that the problem has nothing to do with the transmissions I don't see how that is possible. The mechanic did tell me that the cooling lines did not line up exactly even though he was told by the outfit selling us the transmission that it was an exact match. I believe he mentioned that testing showed that the transmission and rear diff were a good match - my words not his, but I don't think rear diff is the problem. Anybody have any thoughts on this? I've searched and searched the internet and come up empty-handed.