What is the hardest part of working on an older classic transmission?

Summary:

Jaden pushes back on the premise slightly, saying older classic transmissions are actually pretty fun to work on. The genuine difficulty is parts availability. A few companies still manufacture parts for these units, but even so the parts can be hard to find. He identifies a second challenge that comes up when the shop has not worked on a particular unit in a while. The transmissions themselves are pretty basic models, but there is usually not much documentation available for them. Modern units come with diagrams the shop can reference when it encounters something unfamiliar, and the older transmissions do not have that. So when the work moves into territory the technicians are not immediately familiar with, the reference material that would normally help simply is not available for that era of transmission.

Answer:

So older classic transmissions are actually pretty fun to work on. The only hard part about running into those is usually trying to find parts for them. There's a few companies out there that do make parts for them, but sometimes even still they are hard to find. Sometimes it can get a little tricky if you haven't done one in a while. They're pretty basic models. However, there's usually not a whole lot of diagrams for the older ones. And so if we run into an area where it's not something we're super familiar with, then diagrams are nice, and those old ones don't have that. So it's not that the transmission itself is complicated, because they're simpler than what we work on now. It's that you can't always get the parts, and you don't have the documentation to fall back on the way you do with a newer unit.