I just rebuilt the transmission on a '97 Grand Caravan. My first one!! Slight backstory, the van has 128K miles and had it's 3rd transmission in it when it came to me with "transmission problems" I pulled it apart and found that the planetary gears had been completely destroyed, and the clutch pack was ground down to paper thin disc's. Anyway, I get the whole thing back together and installed and from a dead stop its fine, goes through the gears, but once it hits 3rd it won't down shift back into 2nd.
If you shift manually into 1st it works fine and will start off in 1st and go through the gears. But this must repeated each time.
A friend said it could be the valve body (I did NOT clean this when the transmission was apart) So I dropped the pan and took the valve body apart, and it was pretty full of gunk.
I'm still in the process of putting that back together if anyone has a link to an exploded view of where all the valves/springs go I would greatly appreciate it!!
Also, one of the balls was plastic, is this normal? Should I replace it with a steel one?
Thank you!