By Wayne Colonna. The U140/240 – U150/250 transmissions have their fare share of valve body malfunction making the purchase of a new or a good used one a frequent occurrence. Such was one experience with a U140E valve body in a RAV 4.
The tech working on the vehicle purchased a good experienced valve body from a hard part supplier which after it was installed had no reverse unless he played with the shifter. When he selected Drive the transmission had a very bad delayed engagement but if he pulled the selector down one more notch the transmission would immediately engage. He removed the valve body and started to compare it with his original valve body when he noticed that the manual valves were different lengths. He decided to use his original manual valve in the replacement valve body. When he installed the valve body it worked flawlessly. This of course peeked our attention as up to this point we were not aware of the U140E valve bodies having different length manual valves. After looking into it, it was discovered that all U140E’s do indeed have the same manual valve lengths. The difference is between the U140E and a U150E transmissions as you can see in figures 1 and 2. The U140E manual valve in figure 1 has a lengthier shoulder behind the manual valve link slot as the U150E seen in figure 2. Figure 3 is a line drawing of the two valves with spool and manual valve length dimensions to assist you in recognizing the difference between the two. Apparently this gentleman is that he had received a U140E valve body with a U150E manual valve in it from the hard part supplier as this type of mix can easily happen. Especially in these cases when a bench has several 140/150 valve bodies on it and the manual valve falls out and rolls down the bench.
