Chevy Express transmission removal issues

[booster]

A while it was brought to my attention by another member here, Dick Tillinger (aka dicktill), who discovered that the trans in his 09 chassis C190P could not be removed by normal methods. Roadtrek had made the transmission unremovable without taking out the water tanks, including fresh underbody, grey, and black tanks. This was news to me, as nothing had ever come up on it, that I recalled. The next time I had the van up in the air, I took a look, and yep, no way to remove the transmission cross member without taking out the tanks because the bolts come through the frame from the outboard sides and the tanks block moving the bolts back far enough to clear the crossmember.

A correction on edit to the above, which I just changed. Dick had actually found the issue when he was removing the macerator and other stuff to take the Roadtrek to the dealer, and then he informed them about it. They were good folks, it appears, and managed to do the trans repair in place.

My first impression was something along the lines of "what kind of moron would do that?" Lately I have gone even further in the not happy vein .

The tanks are not readily removable as the plumbing is all glued in place with no disconnects, and some folks who have had plumbing issues needed to remove the exhaust to get to it, so the job of just getting ready to have a tranny fixed is likely way harder than the tranny fix itself, and might require visits to and exhaust shop and RV dealer before the tranny shop, and again afterward. If this happened when you were 3000 miles from home, it would be a sure fire way to ruin your trip, and probably triple the cost of your tranny repair.

Dick got lucky in his situation, as his warranty repair was able to be done without removing the transmission, but I know that would not happen to us, so I decided to take a look at making the crossmember removable again, like it should be. As far as we know right now, this applies to 2007 and 2009 chassis Chevy Roadtreks, and likely goes back to the body change in 2003. Unknown whether it changed with the 6 speed coming in at the 2010 model. It is easy to tell if your van is this way, as you can easily see the bolts can't be removed to clear the crossmember. Other brands might be similar, but that is unknown. It would be interesting to hear from anyone who has had this issue in real life.

The crossmember is inside of the main frame rails and held in by 3 bolts through the frame rails from the outside to the inside. Making it worse is the fact that the nuts on the inside of crossmember are welded to the crossemember, so can't be removed, making the bolts need even more travel to clear and impossible to cut off enough to help.

I had a few weeks of slack time so I tried to find a way to remove the crossmember without cutting in in pieces, but couldn't really find a way. At that point I started removing tanks, which was a big job requiring removing all the macerator stuff, almost all the heat shields, cutting out all the plumbing and vents, and getting access through the running boards at the front of passenger side rear wheel (I was lucky as ours was removable pieces from a previous mod-if you have a single battery pre 2007 model the battery box side would need to be cut out or the running board removed). I was able to do it without dropping the exhaust (not pleasant, though), which would have been much worse, but I did have to remove a couple of hangers to move shields out of the way.

Once the tanks were out, the crossmember was easy to remove, but I wanted to modify it so it could come out without other efforts in case of an on road failure. Bottom line is that the driver side is pretty easy, as nut plates (home made) mounted on the outside of the frame worked well for two of the bolts, with the bolts coming from the inside after removing the welded nuts. The rearmost bolt on the driver side won't go in from the inside because of the ABS module, so that was shortened, the welded nut removed and then used as a removable nut. That bolt will just clear the crossmember when pushed back against the fresh tank.

The passenger side had only a bit over 3/8" from the tank to the frame, so very little room for nut plates, especially considering that the original weldnuts were extra thick and closer to 1/2" high. The assumption for me was that there likely was a reason they wanted more thread engagement. They also used odd strength metric bolts at 9.8 instead of the more typical 8.8 mediums, or 10.8 high strength ones, which was odd. I decided to use shouldered nut plates to put most of the thread within the frame and leave a lot of clearance to the grey tank, but thatturned out poorly because there are internal support tubes in the frame to prevent crushing. That in itself would probably been OK, but they were split tubes like a spring pin, and fairly hard, so the instantly broke drills and broke out the open side. Long story short, it took more than week to fix the carnage, so I wouldn't recommend that method

Smaller diameter shoulders, with minimal intrusion into the frame should work, though, as it would require no, or tiny drilling of the frame or tubes. It puts the nut plate right at the tank, though. The rear hole on the passenger side has clearance and a full height nut plate works fine.

As long as all was apart, I decided to make the tanks easier to remove with no cutting, and also address the plumbing that is right above the exhaust pipes from the floor drain and kitchen, as others have had melted piping in that area. I was able to make some changes to the grey tank to make connections that were pretty easy to get to and remove, and just put rubber couplings on the black tank piping as it was right at the opened up running board on the passenger side. The floor drain run was moved a bit to hopefully a cooler spot, and the rest of the plumbing above the exhaust shields was changed to schedule 80 CPVC which gives about 40* more temp tolerance.

I also put watertight wire connectors on the harness that goes through the crossmember, so it wouldn't interfere with removal, and also did all the sensors for the Seelevel tank gauge and the macerator, so they would easier to disconnect if the tank or sensor needed to come out.

Or macerator outlet had been changed to hard pvc pipe that mounted to the crossmember, so that also had to go away. I changed it to 1" rubber heater hose, that actually worked very well since it could run along our recently installed gravity backup dump pipe across the van.

I am finally done with it all, and it seems to all be working fine, but it took nearly a month and maybe 120 hours to do, in our well equipped shop. It would be virtually impossible to do yourself while on the road unless you could rent a shop to work in.

I really don't know what to recommend to others. If you don't have a transmission failure while on the road, it would be a waste of time and money to fix it ahead of time. If you do have a failure on the road, you would save your trip and likely many thousands of dollars by doing having it ahead of time. Especially since we do our own work, doing it ahead made sense, but also it would make sense to just count on putting the Roadtrek on a transport home if the tranny died, as it likely would be much cheaper than having all this done with unknown shops in a strange place.

Unfortunately, I forgot to get pix when starting, but if you have bolts from the side of the frame by the tanks, you likely have the issue, I think. If the bolts come up from the bottom, you likely won't have the issue.

I am still putting together the pix of the changes that were done, and will be adding them over a while.

Anyone with any history and/or different years information would be useful for all of us, I think, to get posted.

I just can't believe Roadtrek would hang all the customers out to dry like this, as it would have been so easy to fix at the initial build.

[BBQ]

.

No pix?


That's disappointing to hear.

I know on their Mercedes Sprinter RV,
a few people had bad NOx sensors,
they took the RV to MB for warranty service,
and found out that MB could not get to the sensor without first removing a few parts.
Of course MB would not touch any RV components.
RT eventually worked out with MB on paying for the extra work.

[booster]

As I said, pix are coming

[cruising7388]

I'll check on this on the current 210.

[cruising7388]

Originally Posted by BBQ

.

No pix?


That's disappointing to hear.

I know on their Mercedes Sprinter RV,
a few people had bad NOx sensors,
they took the RV to MB for warranty service,
and found out that MB could not get to the sensor without first removing a few parts.
Of course MB would not touch any RV components.
RT eventually worked out with MB on paying for the extra work.

Some interesting issues here. If the tranny crashes during the chassis warranty period, does Roadtrek cover the additional expense to access the tranny? Further, even with the offer of reimbursement by RT to Chevy, will the Chevy facility be willing to undertake this sort of work? They're certainly under no obligation to do so. You might end up having to tow the coach to some RV facility to have the interfering components removed and subsequently restored.

[booster]

I would guess that under warranty there probably haven't been many claims, as automatic transmissions tend to almost always make it through without issues. Of course there are always exceptions, and it would be interesting to here is anyone around here has heard of any.

Yes, as I mentioned, I think you might first have to go to an exhaust shop to have the exhaust dropped, then the RV dealer for tank removals, then the transmission shop, then back to the RV dealer, and then back to the exhaust shop. If you are in a spot without those kinds of expertise, and you are stranger, you could wind up with some major issues with a corner mechanic taking all the RV parts off and on. On top of that, you would be right back where you started with a repaired, but again hard to remove transmission as it is unlikely you will find someone to modify that part in a short time.

A repair like this could cost Roadtrek many thousands of dollars in the extra work required, and of course they will fight it if you happen to not be near a Roadtrek dealer.

I should be able to get the finished pix in the morning as I need to get flat under and the right angles because there is so little room and the floor is finally clear of tools and jacks, and such. They will show how tight it is in spots and how little space you have for parts.

[cruising7388]

Originally Posted by booster

I would guess that under warranty there probably haven't been many claims, as automatic transmissions tend to almost always make it through without issues.

I agree, under normal use, the tranny is likely to last the life of the coach. The exception would be one subjected to heavy towing loads with inexperienced operators. Why a tranny temp gauge or at least an overtemp alarm is not standard on vehicles set up for 5k or more towing capacity is beyond me.

Even after the expiration of the chassis warranty, the resolution still seems murky. No question, after the chassis warranty expiration, absent a recall or TSB, the transmission replacement would clearly be at the owner's expense, but the additional cost of removing and reinstalling RT components necessary to do the work, arguably should still be underwritten by RT within their 5/6 year warranty period.

[booster]

Ok, now some pix. I did seem to lose a few of the early ones somehow, probably when the camera went dead, but most still here. Photo posting limits will make for quite a few posts to get all the pix here. I think it is only 4 or 5 per post.

The original bolting are some that got lost, so the first pix show the finished setup to show how little space there is to deal with in some spots.

The driver side isn't too bad, although the bolts still wouldn't come out far enough with the fresh tank in place. Nut plates on the front two bolts, shortened bolt but still from the outside, with loose nut on the rear one as the bolt can't go in from the inside.



Closer



From the inside of the front bolts. I used step washer to locate better after removing the weldnuts, but would not do that again and would use thick square washers tack welded on over the holes and centered.

[booster]

The passenger side is where the tough clearance issues are, on the front two holes only, as the rear has room for thick nut plate.

This is the rear nut plate,



Here is the front. It looks like it is hitting, but is not really as the seam in the middle of the tank, between the two actual nuts is closer to the frame.



And from the inside of the front bolts. The square washers would be my choice for all positions, but if I had it to do over, they would be tack welded in place.

[booster]

The nut plates are made out of piece of 1/8" thick by 2". The threaded part has a shoulder on it to go into a hole in the plate, and can be flush on the backside or extended to get extra thread by engaging the van frame hole. The threaded sections are 1.5" diameter 1050 alloy cold roller steel, so relatively high strength. The pix show the construction of the ones I used, and are silver brazed together to keep them flatter than if welded.





On the driver side, I only could use the double nut plate because of the previously mentioned issue that required the bolt to go in from the outside of the frame.



The passenger side front nuts are much thinner to clear the tank, the rear is the same as driver side. The double plate was cut in half as all the frame carnage I had caused messed up the locations enough to not locate perfectly as a pair. I think if doing it again, I would make all of them single, as it would be easier in many ways.

[BBQ]

.

Wow

Very tight spaces.

[booster]

That finishes the actually modifications to make the crossmember removable, which was a lot more work than it should have been. If I were doing one from scratch again, this all could be done in about 1 day, including making the nut plates and installing them and getting the crossmember back in place, which has to be removed to take of the weldnuts.

What really takes the time and work is the removing of the tanks, modifying them for the future if you chose to, and getting them all back in again. Doing all of that, including adding wiring connectors, tank connectors, plumbing routing improvements, replacing all of Roadtrek's stripped screw in the heat shields is probably closer to 4 days to do, maybe even longer. At home it is all done from the floor, so a lot of in and out of under the van and crunches to reach in above the stuff that stays in, especially the exhaust.

The pix will show most of the changes, but not all the time consuming stuff like getting all the macerator, heat shields, etc out or out of the way.

To get the grey tank out, the black tank has to come out first, and it has two glued in connections if you have an aisle bathroom, maybe more if you have an enclosed one. The connections are the toilet drain and the black tank vent line, are accessed by removing the forward wall or entire box that is in front of the passenger side rear wheel. I am told that the units that have two 6 volt batteries there have a removable box. The earlier units had the box integral with the running boards, so the front side would have to be carefully cut out get to the two connections that are right behind it. You just saw them off straight as you can, and will put them back together with rubber couplings when done. Pix of this are lost, so none here, but this is the box you need to remove or cut. Ours was the old style but had been changed to use the two batteries, so it was removable. You have to remove the black tank to get the grey tank out.




The grey tank with aisle bath also has two connections on it, with both of them pointing toward the middle of the van right from edge of the tank. You have to reach over the exhaust and the frame to cut them off very close to even with the elbows on the tank or they won't clear the frame when lower the tank. No pix as it was too tight to see much anyway. I used an oscillating saw, and the reach still sucked big time as you have to hold yourself up off the floor high enough to see and reach. The forward connection comes from the kitchen and floor drains and is just a pipe into the tank elbow. The rear connection is the vent and it comes toward the van and right into an elbow to the rear, which makes the cutting hard as you can't see well. With them cut and sensors unwired, the grey tank can be dropped out.

[booster]

Here is the grey tank after I did the modifications to it to allow future easier removal. The fitting on the left is the original fitting, with the glued in pipe cut off flush. I then used a die grinder to grind out the inside of it to the tap drill size for threaded 1.5" pipe thread, and tapped it 1.5" NPT. This was done to allow a theaded stub pipe to be screwed into the fitting from a clearer area where I could also put a rubber coupling.



The right hand fitting originally pointed the same way as the left one. I didn't want to mess with the tank connection and sealing to remove it from the tank, with it's pipe, so used the die grinder to grind the fitting down to the vertical pipe, so a new fitting could be glued on facing the rear, and making it so it clears the frame when putting the tank in and out without removing it. The area it exits to at the rear is clear to the ground once the black tank is out, so I used a rubber coupling on it there, to the old vent line after offsetting it to the right spot.

Here is the grey tank back in place with the stub pipe threaded into the tank. This puts it into the clear so rubber coupling can be easily used.



And here it is with the coupling on it.



Here is the vent pipe connection directly to the rear of the grey tank, with rubber coupling. The writing and line are needed to locate the tank in the right spot for the other plumbing to line up.

[booster]

Once the grey tank modifications were done, the black tank goes in without anything else except cleaning up the two cut pipes. You can put the new rubber coupings on the stubs in the body and just lift up the tank and guide them together. Make sure the tank is all the way up with brackets and clamp the couplings.

The drain line for our floor drain passed an angle right over the exhaust above the shields before combining with the kitchen drain line. I was able to do move it more the side and straighter, hopefully in a cooler spot. I changed the rest of plumbing over the heat to CPVC in schedule 80, which is rated about 40* higher for temp. 3 rubber couplings allow this entire assembly to go in and out easily for future access.

Here is the assembly that has the floor drain trap, kitchen drain connection, wye fitting and the connection to attach to the threaded in pipe stub in the tank.



The floor drain line in it's new spot



The CPVC wye that gets the kitchen and floor drain together



And the new stuff connected to the original kitchen drain line.

[booster]

At this point there were lots things to put in like heat shields, macerator, wiring connectors, which all fit where they originally were. The only real change was the removal of the macerator output hard plumbing that was in the crossmember and replacing it with a 1" heater hose to the side pod along the emergency gravity dump pipe.

Nothing really changed much here, but the pix show the dual dumping system and new discharge line.







This is the connector on the wires that run through the crossmember. It can be simply unplugged and pulled back through the crossmember to get it out of the way for crossmember removal.

[booster]

Pretty much done, just some pix of the macerator with splash guard on it, and the road clearance compared to the pods and running boards. The macerator guard is open on both ends to facilitate cooling and also deep water quick elimination once out. We haven't had any issues with splash or dirt issues from the open ends.

[ManWonder]

here is my dilemma: my 2004 RT190P's tranny started making a whining noise when put in gear at around 50k miles. I bought the coach with 33k miles and the previous owner told me Roadtrek had replaced the tranny under warranty. I took it to a couple of local shops and one found nothing wrong while another suggested it could be the transmission pump and told me of a shop where I might have it looked at. One mechanic told me his friend's truck made the same noise and had for the last 4 years. My current odometer reading is over 70k. But the noise drives me nuts to the point I am ready to get it fixed. Given it's a Roadtrek with the Chevy 3500 extended chassis I wonder do I need to take it to an RV shop or can I take it to a transmission repair facility? Any recommendations in the northern VA (USA) area?

[SteveJ]

Originally Posted by ManWonder

here is my dilemma: my 2004 RT190P's tranny started making a whining noise when put in gear at around 50k miles. I bought the coach with 33k miles and the previous owner told me Roadtrek had replaced the tranny under warranty. I took it to a couple of local shops and one found nothing wrong while another suggested it could be the transmission pump and told me of a shop where I might have it looked at. One mechanic told me his friend's truck made the same noise and had for the last 4 years. My current odometer reading is over 70k. But the noise drives me nuts to the point I am ready to get it fixed. Given it's a Roadtrek with the Chevy 3500 extended chassis I wonder do I need to take it to an RV shop or can I take it to a transmission repair facility? Any recommendations in the northern VA (USA) area?

Definitely NOT an RV shop.

DO consider a Jasper unit. You can find cheaper but Jasper does have a nationwide dealer network and from what I've heard have an excellent product. A brother of mine is getting an upgraded one from them for his '97 Dodge RT soon. I have no direct experience with them and hopefully will not have to.

Except for the problems shedding heat that Chevy tranny is a pretty solid unit. Booster has come up with help for that and I'm considering it.

[booster]

Originally Posted by ManWonder

here is my dilemma: my 2004 RT190P's tranny started making a whining noise when put in gear at around 50k miles. I bought the coach with 33k miles and the previous owner told me Roadtrek had replaced the tranny under warranty. I took it to a couple of local shops and one found nothing wrong while another suggested it could be the transmission pump and told me of a shop where I might have it looked at. One mechanic told me his friend's truck made the same noise and had for the last 4 years. My current odometer reading is over 70k. But the noise drives me nuts to the point I am ready to get it fixed. Given it's a Roadtrek with the Chevy 3500 extended chassis I wonder do I need to take it to an RV shop or can I take it to a transmission repair facility? Any recommendations in the northern VA (USA) area?

Transmission shop for sure on the transmission work, but as this thread discusses, somebody may have to remove the tanks so they can get the transmission out to fix or replace it. That would likely have to be done by you or an RV shop. As shown in the earlier posts, getting the tanks out and back in is a lot of work, with some people saying it cost as much as the transmission work itself. Even if the tanks don't have to come out, you will have some stuff like the dump plumbing that will have to come off.



That said, we have also had some say that they had the transmission replaced without removal of the tanks, which means taking it out without removing the crossmember. I talked to a few shops about that and never got a for sure answer. If it were done that way I think it would entail cutting off the long stud on the transmission mount so it could be removed and let the trans slide back more and then take it out the front by tilting it down. This is a bit iffy because the torque converter will try to slide off the input shaft and fall out.



I think it may be a good idea to go to a couple of reputable transmission shops and get an opinion on the noise cause and also put it on the rack to look and see if they can get it out without removing the crossmember. Having one of the shops be a Jasper dealer is not a bad idea as they do have a good reputation. Another option is a pickup/4X4 type shop as they will be more in tune with building a heavier duty unit than most common shops are. Normal off the shelf rebuilds don't normally use the best of parts in many cases. If you do look around for information it will be very interesting to see what you find out, as I think we still aren't certain on the tanks.

[Bud]

"I think we still aren't certain on the tanks."

booster, does that include your Express Van?