4.56 Gears Early Shifts

[04HemiBrother]

I recently installed 4.56 Gears on my 04 Ram 1500 Hemi. Driving around town in part throttle truck feels sluggish, shifts too early and bogs down on the hills. My SuperChips Flashpaq F5 Tuner doesn’t have gear size parameter exposed to adjust shift points. Holley customer support says they don’t have adjustability for any early 3rd Gen Ram to adjust for gear ratio. Has anyone adjusted their shiftpoints after 4.56 gear swap with successful results?

 

[HemiLonestar]

I don't think a modern solution exists for the pre-06 RFE. Back in the day you could use a Superchips to program the trans but I don't think the newer tuners carry that feature anymore. Have to find an older one like a 3865 and hope that someone had sprung for the trans tuning option (it cost extra back then).

 

[04HemiBrother]

Those look like they’re tough to come by these days... I called the local dealerships and asked if they can flash the PCM with the new gears. One of them agreed to it. After hooking in their scan tool they said that only the pinion factor for the ABS module can be adjusted to compensate for the gear change. They changed the revs per mile to 785 and tone ring of 108. After that the speedo was 10 mph slow. Brought it back and they set it to 705. The truck still shifts the same and speedo is still 5 mph slow.

Should the dealer not have messed with those values because my speedo was good prior? I’m running 265/70R17 tires so the revs should have been set to 657 based on my tire spec…

 

[HemiLonestar]

No they should not have messed with that. Honestly I'm surprised they wee willing to try....most places anymore won't touch anything that old and they've already tossed the equipment needed.

 

[04HemiBrother]

Me too, too bad it didn’t work out... I went to a local tuner and they couldn’t connect to my PCM either with HP tuners. Unsure why exactly… on their site it says they work for 04 Ram 1500 Hemi. After a lot of digging it looks like 04 was the transitional year for the NGC1 -> NGC3. HP doesn’t support NGC1s and I called around to 5 dealerships to confirm which gen I have, and they weren’t able to confirm based on my part number 56029159AD. Any other ideas would be appreciated!

 

[04HemiBrother]

Would increasing tone gear value work instead or revs per mile as another workaround?

 

[HemiLonestar]

I'm trying to remember if I ever changed mine....I put 4.56's in my 2003. I had a DRBIII but I don't actually remember (this was like 15 yrs ago) if I ever changed the ratio in the TCM (03's have a separate TCM) or not. I never had shift issues, just RFE's dying on a regular basis.

 

[Wild one]

Me too, too bad it didn’t work out... I went to a local tuner and they couldn’t connect to my PCM either with HP tuners. Unsure why exactly… on their site it says they work for 04 Ram 1500 Hemi. After a lot of digging it looks like 04 was the transitional year for the NGC1 -> NGC3. HP doesn’t support NGC1s and I called around to 5 dealerships to confirm which gen I have, and they weren’t able to confirm based on my part number 56029159AD. Any other ideas would be appreciated!

Get ahold of Ryan Hogan at Flying Ryan Performance he used to play around with the earlier computors.

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