1998 Camry shifts erratic

[ac680]

repair and diagnose cars for a living.
Despite all the great things people percieve about toyota, not all are so lucky.
My neighbor has this 1998 Toyota Camry, 1 owner car, and for the last 5 years he has gone back to the dealer a few times to solve an erratic shifting problem.
Dealer always said he could not duplicate the problem, so now.. his engine seized, oil pump went, and I ended up with his car. Car has 110K miles.
I replaced this engine with a rebuilt one, could not find a good used one.( I am not the only one)
Soo, the Camry runs fine again, but the shifting problem remained, and now its my problem.
Shift solenoid B (No 2)according to OBD diagnostics. It commands solenoid on, but apparently the transmission fails to shift.. sometimes...
No first gear, so it takes off in second, and no overdrive so stays in 3rd.. sometimes..
It always will go forward or reverse, but seems to have its own idea's what forward gear to use.
If the trans hangs up in third, I can shift to neutral, and back in Drive, and than voila, overdrive is there.
Forced take off in Low will always get a first gear, so I think the Trans is structurally sound.
Clearly shiftsolenoid B (No 2) is the issue, logic tracing with the toyota books indeed agree with a shiftsolenoid B problem. Replacing the Solenoid did not cure the problem.
There are no other fault codes in the diagnostics.
I noticed that the signal that goes to this solenoid is used to by the cruise computer.

So anyhow, before I begin to tackle this in depth, maybe someone has a suggestion?

Maybe a bad actuator signal form the ECM?

Anyhow, it has been like this for about 5 years according to my neighbor, he learned to live with the quircks, but I cannot.

Henri.

[abew330]

i read on another website that someone was having problems with there tranny as well and was very similar to your prob...

it had something to do with the solenoid... it turned out that the TQ converter thing was bad.

[Eyebrows7]

Damn, 5 years of putting up with that... Your neighbor is crazy.

So you think its a certain solenoid, but nothing changed when you replaced it. Perhaps there's an open in that circuit?

[ac680]

Indeed my neighbor put up 5 years with this, but I will not, and continued with my cruise control hunch. And now, after disconnecting the connector to the cruise everything is fine, 3 days of driving, no problems, no codes.. never happened before according to the previous owner, my neighbor.
Indeed the cruise computer is wired to shift solenoid B (2) to force a 3rd gear actuation during excessive speed loss.
For some reason the cruise ocasionally was sending a signal just to do this, even when it was off.
I will replace the cruise computer next week.

So there we are, erratic shifting caused by the cruise computer..
One more experience.

The Dutchman.