Snoxxy

This is pretty accurate. One of my other cars is an Evo with a stroker engine that was built when I was still stationed in Japan. The builder told me that with the clearances, i need to run 20w50 oil, and that my minimum hot oil idle pressure is 15psi ( factory engine minimum oil press is like 5psi, gas engines are a wee bit different). The builder had used Motul engine oil, but that stuff was CRAZY expensive in Japan. I used LiquiMoly, hot idle pressure dropped by a few psi, still above the minimum, but it dropped. Then I tried ELF racing oil, and that could barely hold minimum psi, car ran noticably rougher. Enter Valvoline VR1. That stuff is AWESOME. I do not know what valvoline puts in there, but its amazing! super resilient against breaking down, holds hot oil pressure even better than Motul. And it is very reasonably priced. Mind you, this poor car gets hammered and abused every single time I drive it. It really brings out the pissed off teenager in me. Lesson here, all these oils were 20w50, and while in theory they should all perform somewhat similar, this couldn't be further from the truth! And now I have a case of VR1 on the shelf at all times. Also, I checked the AMSOil dex 3, and its cold pour point and cold flow performance are FAR superior, but it is synthetic of course. research will continue.

Well dang! You are taking me to school here! I did some quick searching/google/bing and even asked Jeeves :) and turns out that valvoline dex3 is likely the best cold weather performing fluid out there. cSt of valvoline is 2 points lower at 40C compared to competitors. However, the Brookfield test is checking for cold weather performance, and valvoline has the lowest pour point and the lowest cP at -40C. Guess I am going to change fluids over and see how that does.

That’s all some serious food for thought! I currently have O’Reilly Conventional Premium ATF Dexron III in there. Firepunk was very specific about it having to be conventional dex3 fluid. If you have a suggestion for other oil, I am all ears/eyeballs.

Thanks for the response! So I did the Neutral idle for a bit as well when this was actively going on, and I am not sure if this helped or not, as I would let the truck idle for about 3 to 5 minutes and then put it in gear. It didn't stall very often to begin with, but I never had it stall doing the neutral idle. I really only had it stall maybe a total of 5 times over a few weeks before I employed the "raise the RPM while standing on the brakes" method, which has been flawless so far. I will keep monitoring, but here in south GA I doubt we will have any more really cold mornings happen, and perhaps TC will loosen up a bit over the year. Is there perhaps better fluid that will be better in the cold? Firepunk did specify DexMerc 3 NON synthetic, so there is a specific suggestion for a brand of fluid that deals better with the cold, I am all ears. Phil

John, Thanks for the reply! I have no removed the EZ yet, maybe something to consider. I did ask Firepunk what stall the new TC is, and I was told about 150rpm below factory. I have ZERO issues driving this thing around, it shifts super crisp. I will look into the this ECM thing some more, another thing I am chasing right now is the Wait To Start delay, it is a couple seconds right now, so from reading through here, I know that I have to look into getting the ECM rebuild/replaced. When this happens, I will be asking about the anti-stall feature. Phil

Greetings, Long time listener, firl time caller here. TLDR: When cold, the transmission sometimes stalls the engine, but only once. Trans new - Firepunk, billet torque converter. EDIT - No Codes present Video with the issue posted on bottom of this post. So I recently moved back to the states from a long stint living overseas, and I picked up a 99 4x4 A/T truck. Power wise, the truck is completely stock apart from an Edge EZ the PO installed. Everything was great, except the trans would not lockup in O/D. Following many suggeestions from here that could have an effect on the lockup, I realized this was a torque converter issue. I ended up deciding to bite the bullet and have a built trans put in, and had Firepunk DIesel install one of their stage 1 transmissions, which comes with a billet single disc torque converter. The trans works great, OD locks up super hard, have about 3500 miles on it so far, and i have no qualms with how it shifts or how it behaves. Here is my issue. After christmas, drove to northern Ohio (I currently live in southern GA), and of course it was quite a bit colder. The truck sat overnight and it got pretty cold, as it dropped to roughly 15f. When starting it, I let it run for about 5 minutes, and when pulling it into reverse, the engine stalled out. This was new to me. once putting the truck back into P, and trying again, it worked fine. This has happened a few times, and I even reached out to firepunk about this, and they thoughts maybe my PCM commands lockup and that this causes the engine to stall out. I made a test circuit that lights up a LED whenever the PCM commands lockup. With this I was able to prove lockup is working as required. I googled this a bunch, and this is apparently a relatively known issue on VP44 trucks, for the injection pump can't cope fast enough with the added load of the lower stall? I have since started to raise rpm to about 1000 when putting it into gear, essentially power braking it, and this totally works, but I feel like there should be a better solution. The stall is also not extremely abrupt, it really feels more like a car that has the emergency brake pulled, and someone releases the clutch while in gear. The engine loads and dies, it happens within about a second. Further, if the truck happened to stall due to this, once restarted, it powers through it. I am all ears if the smart folk in here have some insight into this, as the approach of "thats just how a VP44 is" doesn't sit right with me. Thanks in advance, and sorry for the long post, I try to be descriptive. Phil P.S.: I was unable to attach a video, so I just threw it on youtube as an unlisted video.