After sitting in a box on my living room floor for around 6 weeks, my extreme valve body is finally in my truck and working. For those who aren't familiar,
Wholesale Automatics is an outfit in Australia that does rebuilds and upgrades of Land Cruiser automatic transmissions (A440F, A442F, A343F) as well as other brands. Their
extreme line goes beyond a simple rebuild, with components being recalibrated and machined to tighter than factory tolerances (yadda yadda, best thing ever, yadda yadda). The
extreme valve body is touted to give you greater clamping pressure for the clutch packs and torque convertor lock up, quicker shifts, and greater flow to the cooler. But the big advantage of these units is that they give you torque convertor lock-up in 3rd gear (when above the same road speed as for OD lock-up) so that you can take steep hills and tow on the highway with more umph and less heat generation (from the torque convertor).
So, I have an A440F in good shape, about 170 000 miles on it, and decided to swap in the new valve body after hearing good things from others here on mud who have done it. Wholesales products are now distributed in North America by
Pacesetter Products out of the Yukon (same guys as Outback Imports, one of the big JDM importers in Canada). They list the valve body at $1250 Cdn, an enquiry direct to Rodney at Wholesale sent me back to Pacesetter...... I'm sure you all want to know what I paid, all I'll say is that Jesse at Pacesetter and I agreed to a price, and it was considerably less than the list price.
Here are a couple pics of the valve body straight out of the box. It came with a new strainer/filter & gasket, a new pan gasket, 4 new o-ring seals (that go between the valve body and transmission case) and a recalibrated spring for one of the accumulators: