02J transmissions are fairly reliable but do have their problems. I thought I would document some of the failures I’ve seen here on this page. Everyone on this page we fixed.
If you want to purchase some of the small parts for 02J transmissions click here—> 02J shopping page
Simple Differential bearing failure.
When the bearings fail on the differential or on the pinion it makes a whine noise. It will usually whine on acceleration and quiet down when coasting.
And the following pic is the worn bearing race. We were able to fix this one with just some bearings.
Major pinion bearing failure
This one made a bunch of noise and when we pulled it out we found more damage than we were expecting.
This used to be the lower pinion bearing.
It wore through the case like this. I would have loved to weld up the hole and replace the bearings, but the race had spun in the case and didn’t fit tightly, so the case half had to be changed. We can install replacement case when necessary.
The other pinion bearing had some minor wear. I only saved a picture of the race though.
Self Machining syndrome
When the Pin that the spider gears spin on comes out the pin moves outwards and rubs the case until the case wears a hole in it. Sometimes it moves out and breaks the case. After pulling out the trans we found this hole.
Sometimes the cause is the rolled pin breaks and allows the pin to come out. Here’s the broken pin from ours.
Here’s another one that broke the rolled pin. It was pretty amazing to find it this bad. Trans was still working fine.
Please note that spinning the wheels in the snow or on any slick surface and contribute to breaking the pin or making the diff pin come out.
Case had some rub marks from “stuff” hitting it but it was ok and we reused it see pics below. Simply replacing the Diff with some new bearings fixed it.
In the next pic the trans had shift problems. We suspected wear like this when we took it apart because 3rd and 4th didn’t work at all.
Here’s a closeup. Resting the weight of your hand on the shifter can cause this type of wear.
And here’s what the fork pads are supposed to look like. We fixed this trans with nothing but few seals and this fork.
5th gear has a fork that can wear as well. Here’s the 1-2 and 3-4 fork with the 5th fork.
5th gear Hub and Slider wear.
This is a common problem and usually results in the trans getting stuck in 5th. First pic shows wear on the hub.
When this wear gets bad enough the ridges keep it from coming out of 5th. By the way this wear is made worse by “lugging” the motor by driving around in 5th when you should be in 4th. Keeping the revs up and driving in a lower gear will prevent wear on trans and engine. This pic shows the matching wear on the slider.
We have fixed some of these without removing the trans, so that is a possibility, but sometimes we find this wear while repairing some other part and this jumps the price up as these are some expensive parts.
Spider gear thrust washer breakage.
I’ve find these broken or worn on about 50% of the ones I take apart so its a good idea to change this on every one. Its not a real expensive part so it goes in everyone.
Reverse gear wear
Treat your reverse well or else you’ll end up chipping the teeth on your gears. These are some expensive parts but there are some used available to save money.
Wavetrac or Peloquin differential install
Comes with a nice install kit with the speedo gear, the bearings and the bolts to install the original ring gear. You’ll see grind marks in the next pics on the gear from cutting the rivots. Grinding off the rivots is a labor intensive process, and we have to do this when we have to replace a stock differential also.
Here’s another pic of the wavetrac since its pretty.
So with diff problems so common I wanted to show a good used cleaned up diff.
And here’s the new parts including, bearings, speedo gear, spider gear thrust washer and new rolled pin.
If you want to purchase some of the small parts for 02J transmissions click here—> 02J shopping page
So with bearing wear, 5th gear slider and hub wear, fork wear, spider thrust wear, differentials exploding we feel like we can handle any repair on these. We’ve repaired bunches of these and can offer repairs for these even if your out of town. Ship them in to us and we can make it work again.
Contact us in the following link. —–> Contact page…..
