Hi,

I own a 2006 Honda Accord V6 EX-L with 280K kilometers (located in BC Canada).

I bought this car few months ago without any issues and then suddenly a check engine light came up with hard shifting/jolting from first to second gear. Also i noticed i have a delayed reverse gear. Sometimes the reverse gear wouldn't work at all. I drained the transmission fluid and checked the magnetic plug for metal shavings. well i would describe its minimal. I filled with fresh Honda ATF fluid, 3 quarts together with half or maybe a little less bottle of lucas stop slip. Afterwards I scanned the code with a wifi odb tool and found out a code P0747 which was I believe, related to the Dual linear actuator solenoid. I searched youtube and google and a lot of conclusions came out that my transmission maybe dying. Anyways ignoring all the various online result I decided to DYI clean the solenoid.

As instructed from the maintenance manual, i got from a forum, i cleaned the solenoid with throttle body cleaner, including the little meshes and screens inside the solenoid. After 30 minutes of cleaning my car drove well for few kilometers when the same hard shifting/jolting came up again together with another check engine code. This time it was P0741. scanner suggested its the shift solenoid stuck open. I decided to clean the shift solenoids now both brown and black only on the top as i forgot there were two more on the bottom side. Again after reassemble and driving for few minutes the check light didn't go but the jolting became soft on first to second and none in the higher gears.

One free day i decided to clear out the code. I opened all the shift solenoid except for black one on the bottom as i did not have the bigger socket to unbolt the starter. In the mean time i ordered two shift solenoid fairly cheap from amazon and tried to install them but the connector heard was not tight and the reverse delayed shift minimized but it shifted with a jolt. Same when i shifted to drive. Check engine light came P0742 circuit voltage vale high so i decided to put the old solenoid back.

Here the fun part. On installation i mistakenly swapped the two brown solenoids to each others place so i placed the bottom brown solenoid on the top and the top brown on the bottom. Now i don't have any check engine light but when the car drives, say like 10km and the engine is hot and the transmission is hot it shift erratically, hard shift, jolting into gears and probably slipping. This also caused my passenger side CV shaft to twist into two halves. So i changed the cv shaft and swapped back the solenoids to old positions as they where. Now i don't have a check engine light and soft jolting from 1-2 and sometimes 2-3.

So now i am trying my best to think that my transmission is not dead because if it was i wouldn't be able to drive intermittently. A used transmission is almost $700 cad plus i have to pay a mechanic to assemble. Also transmission repair also is similar cost. I am a student and i cant spend much plus this is my only transport.

I wanna know if anyone here in this group faced the similar situation.
Wanna know some experts advice.
Do you think swapping the solenoid made a big problem and should i expect this to come back again even though they are back to their own positions?
Should a used transmission with less kilometers, replace be worth it?
Should i just dispose the car to a scrap yard for $500? Which i obviously don't want to.

Its interesting at the same time a very big pain as it my only car.

Wanna know your responses.

Regards

 

Hi
My 06 V6 had exact same symptoms as you at 130k miles.

Reading your post was a mirror image of what I did with a sad result of a dead transmission in the end.
I've been changing the fluid annually for 5 yrs as a preventative
I cleaned the linear solenoid about 5 months back when slow R shifting and hard 1 - 2 shifting started.
Also replaced 3rd gear switch with an OEM one

None helped, transmission started slipping a and would only sporadically engage in D and stopped doing that within 48 hours. Luckily i was near home and limped it the last few blocks. Only R gear remained at the end.
I ended up selling the car for $1500 - it was 3k to rebuild it and wasn't worth it for me. All this just happened last month.

there's a tiny, small, infinitesimal chance that your amazon switches are junk (if they were $30 for both) and an OEM one may work better - it did not for me. You'd be surprised that this car is still very sellable even with a dead tranny. Online services like vroom were offering $800 sight unseen

good luck, hope you have more luck than I did