Help with Noise from Transmission
 

Hello, first post here, I’ve talked on other spots about other things I fixed up but now I’m on the last part, the transmission. Basically I got my car and it was a shitshow from the beginning, 165k miles on original engine when I bought it, died a month later (broke piston by jumped timing) right before the warranty so they threw a junkyard one in for me for free, then that one went out (timing slipped but I caught it before it damaged anything else) and it was out of warranty and I didn’t have $3,500+ for a new one, so I broke it down and rebuilt it, with one thing going out after the other, so I’ve been replacing all my parts (with OE or better Dorman or AZ/O’R/RA equivalent) and I’ve done pretty much everything at this point, but now that the engines running good I can hear the issue with the trans more pronounced, and I believe it’s either the torque converter, TCC solenoid itself or all the solenoids. The issue it’s having is it runs and drives, but when I get it over about 10-20MPH it starts struggling switching to the next gear, I can tell it’s sluggish in switching gears cause it’ll hover over the end of that gears MPH, take a sec and I release the gas a little bit and then I’ll hear it switch and I press the gas and it will accelerate faster, so I know it’s in next gear, and whenever I let off the gas is when the noise happens most, it sounds like cards in a bikes wheel spokes or something, that’s the best way I can describe it, and happens when I’m actively accelerating and that hang up happens, before I let off the gas a little I’ll hear that sound and then I let off a little, it switches and I push gas and it accelerates faster until the next gear same thing happens, until I get to about 60-70 MPH and then it won’t go over that without me FLOORING it. I tried once just to see if it would go over, and it got up to about 80 but was definitely struggling, so I’m stuck between wether I think it’s the torque converter dying or if it’s just like the TCC/other solenoids dying and causing it to run funny. I don’t have a lot of money, so I’d like to hopefully get one or the other (TC/solenoids) and not have to get the other. I’m just curious what anyone else’s input would be, has anyone else had a similar sounding/same problem? The closest I seen was on another forum one guy was describing my symptoms exactly and said it was his solenoids, he changed them and it went right back to normal/even smoother. But then when I was looking up symptoms of a dying TC, it does sound like that too. So any input would be appreciated to help with the decision, thanks in advance for reading sorry it’s long! Just a unique problem I haven’t seen much talked about elsewhere, so I figured I’d try here too.