Tranny misbehaving?

When starting uphill or accelerating aggressively uphill when tranny downshifts my car exhibits strange behavior .It seams like it tries to shift gears but it takes some time for it to happen. Like a second or a bit longer. It feels like the gears cannot engage but then they engage and all is well. When it happens it feels like driving for a second on corrugations. A series of vibrations goes trough the car. Any ideas guys? I guess the problem might be with the tranny but this is just a guess. Unfortunately I cannot just take the car to transmission shop or dealership. I will need to solve it myself. Any help and ideas are appreciated.

Start by dropping the tranny pan, changing the fluid, and cleaning the filter screen. I'm assuming you've already made sure the fluid level is correct?

Curtis

Another new thread describes similar problem but no solution so far.

https://forum.ih8mud.com/showthread.php?t=193318

Jarek.

This problem was getting more and more pronounced and the symptoms occurred not only during gear shifting but always on acceleration. So I started to suspect something else than tranny. My next diagnosis was engine skipping. Also usually on deep river crossings I got 304 engine light code (cylinder #4 misfiring detected).

I live in a desert with practically no paved roads and lots of dust and bull dust so I cleaned the air filter. Did not help. I drove for 100m on a clean asphalt without an air filter. Did not help. I replaced the fuel filter. from the IN end of the old filter gas came out quite brownish so I thought I got the culprit but not. It did not help.(Changing fuel filter in the 80fzj is a pain in the ... you know where). I remove top engine plastic covers and sprayed water allover in the dark with engine on. No sparks. But remembering 304 code I unplugged the wire plug from the spark plug #4 and looked inside the plastic plug. There was a super tiny white line going on the inside wall of the plug. Like a line of salt. I scraped it, cleaned it and I am back to normal, happy and heading toward Patagonia for the summer!

Now I remember that first time I got the 304 code was on very deep river mouth crossing on a beach during high tide at Chiloe. Salt water must have got into the spark plug well and dried out. Then with even a bit of humidity it was creating a short.