I tow a 5th wheel toy hauler with a 1995 Ram 3500 5.9L automatic for the purposes of doing sound at music festivals. The garage is loaded with PA Gear, lights, mixing consoles, etc. It's a heavy assed load. These things are often held in the middle of nowhere, way off the beaten path, typically miles from the nearest paved road. This is 4 wheeling with a 20K trailer behind you.
As a result, I've gone though the factory transmission, followed by a series of 4 different Jasper rebuild transmissions in a 6 month period, each failed, they covered by warranty but it doesn't help when your miles from anywhere and dead in the water in a field someplace.
My truck was spending more time in the shop waiting on replacement trannies then out on the road and that just wasn't cutting it.
A friend recommended the Texas Performance Diesel guys, so I had it towed to Emory from Dallas. They built me a custom tranny specifically for towing (single billet shafts, pressure valve body, billet torque converter and upgraded clutch pack.
It took a couple trips back to tweeze it out wherein they also replaced my boost elbows, changed the fuel plate and did some other tweaks to get more HP out of the truck when towing.
Since then I've had to abuse the shit out of the transmission, including one trip where the promoter gave me the wrong directions and after 2 miles down hill during the rain from hell and finding it was a dead end with no where to turn around we had to back the thing up all 2 miles, in reverse with rainwater up to the axles and smudging through 3" of mud.
The tranny didn't balk. T Temp never even got into the red (although the EGT's were getting close at some points).
That was 10 years ago. It's still held up day in and day out, through mud and sludge and rutted up fields all over OK, KS, AR & MO. It doesn't even break a sweat on those godawful switchbacks in northern AR. I can tool down the interstate fully loaded at 75 mph all damn day long and not think twice about it.
I could not more highly recommend these guys. They absolutely know their shit, and have completely removed all worrying about a failed transmission. read more