I’ve had several calls this past year; asking if there is a solution on how to fix the worn 6R80 stators, so I thought I would share what we do.

By now, I’m sure most of you have seen the 6R80 Converters found in some of the 2010-2017 Ford F-150s (codes BL3P-AB, BL3P-AC, BL3P-AD, BL3P-AE). When we first started seeing these; we opened one up to do a R&R on it, and quickly discovered the stator was worn. So, we went to our core bank to grab another core, and since it was good; we were able to get the job out. It’s not until volume increased that we saw the extent of how bad those stators were. We were seeing a 90% failure rate from the cores we opened up; so we knew we needed to come up with a fix for it or face a stator shortage.

The issue we see with the factory stator is that the enclosed bearing is captured by the ID of the aluminum stator. As the bearing rotates, it wears out the ID of the stator; as shown in Figure 1.

A closer look at the stator revealed that there will be challenges with applying a weld and then machining to fit the bearing, but while it would help short term; it would not be fixing the problem. So, we developed a fix by machining the stators back to 4.485” (113.92 mm) as shown in Figure 2, and make a 0.145” (3.68 mm) thick steel ring that accommodates the outside diameter of the bearing at 3.670” (93.22 mm) as shown in Figure 3. The ring is placed on the stator (Figure 4), and crimped in four to six places to hold it in place. Figure 5 is the finished part. This is a relatively quick and easy fix, and after seeing 90% of cores with this failure; we do this 100% of the time on these 6R80s.

Eric Saxberg