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can a transmission slip without perceived flares?

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    can a transmission slip without perceived flares?

    I'm just wondering about this.
    Can a transmission slip, without knowing it's slipping?

    There's classic slippage: sudden rpm flare, feels like it's in neutral/no power for a second, then either it grabs again, or it bangs into gear if things are really worn or sloppy, or maybe it grabs onto the next gear down if it's designed to do that when one gear is slipping.
    And when it slips, now there's abrasion, and you wear out clutch material quickly.

    My previous transmission suffered a loosely adjusted tv cable for 2000 miles, and it would slip occasionally in 3rd gear. I didn't find much clutch material in the pan, so I think it's still OK.
    My new project transmission suffers from a too-short overdrive servo piston that does not apply the band far enough, so it slips. I guess it's not impossible that it's a seal issue, but it's not as likely.
    It's slipped and flared a good half dozen times now, before I caught on to what was happening and the cause, and i'm keeping her in Drive until I fix the issue.
    How much damage am I likely to have done?


    On another thread, about another transmission (4r70w?) in a mid-90s vic, someone described a single-slip catastrophic failure:
    "I sold mine at 220k. I had to replace the tranny at 140?, didn't die completely, but got a low mileage tranny for a song and it was geting pretty bad, slipping a little and thunking. It was my fault, I had well over a half ton of stuff driving from Cleveland to Detroit City and didn't know I should've had the OD off. Everything was fine till I pulled away from the last light before the hotel, it slipped horribly (I thought I killed it). Was never right after that. "


    Which got me thinking about the question more.
    I'm imagining that a band around a drum or a piston against clutches follows very elementary high school-taught mechanics: either you exceed the force of static friction, and it slips (and now follows some kinetic friction constant), or, you don't.
    So if you tow in overdrive, and don't perceive shift flares, are you golden and free to tow all you want to your heart's content, up and to the point that you start to see rpm jumps on the tach?

    Or can it be slipping just a little bit under the high load, without seeing sudden losses of grip on the tach and unignorable 3000rpm flares, but still be wearing the band much more rapidly than is natural, only imperceptibly?
    By that story, could either a) the one-time loss of grip have destroyed the band in just a few abrasive rotations of the drum? or b) it was wearing away all along, just the symptoms would have been tiny tics, jumps, on the tach that went unnoticed?
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