U140E Transmission Front Planetary and Reverse Hub Set

This is the complete rotating gear set out of the front half of a Toyota/Lexus U140-family automatic: the three-pin front planetary carrier with welded pins, the three-pin rear planetary carrier, the reverse hub, the front sun gear, the front ring gear and the direct hub. It is cataloged under reference 27582K and covers the U140E, U140F, U240E and U241E units used in Toyota and Lexus front-drive cars from 1998 up, including the RAV4.

Planetary damage in these units almost never shows up as one bad part. When a pinion needle bearing lets go, the pinion pin galls and blues, the carrier cheek picks up heat, and the debris that comes off it scores the sun gear and the ring gear teeth on its way to the pan. By the time you have the case split you are usually looking at a front carrier with a blued pinion, a sun gear with pitted teeth, and a reverse hub with worn splines. Buying the pieces one at a time costs more than the set and leaves mismatched wear in the stack.

The failure that puts most of these on the bench is the classic U140 front planet complaint: a whine or growl that rises and falls with road speed in the lower gears, metal glitter in the pan and on the magnet, and a converter-line filter loaded with bronze and steel. Once needle rollers have gone through the unit, the planetary set is not something you clean up and reuse - the pin bores are already out of round.

On the bench, mock the set up dry before you assemble anything wet. Check pinion end play and side-to-side rock at each carrier, verify the sun gear slides through the front carrier without drag, and replace every thrust washer and thrust bearing in the stack rather than reusing the old ones - a set of new carriers running on flattened thrust washers will fail the same way the last one did. Set and record transmission end play before the case goes together.