djthumper wrote:fishsticks wrote:This. There's a point where if you don't keep up on regular trans maintenance, you might as well just skip it until it fails.
I'd have flushed it and driven it before anything to see if there was a drivability issue. At least then you could start saving up for the inevitable replacement.
I learned this lesson very well on my last vehicle. Sometimes it just sucks to try to take care of something that you think you are doing the right thing...
I disagree with the old "don't flush it, it's too far gone" theory... The stuff I was reading when I was an SAE member (and had access to the documents) leads me to believe that it's not the act of doing the flush and the new fluid freeing up all kinds of crap in the transmission that causes it to fail... It's that this plugs the filter and starves the transmission of fluid, which THEN tears stuff up...
You're supposed to do the flush, THEN a week or 2 later, drop the pan, change the filter, and top off... I did this with an S-10 Blazer that I had, and everything was fine... It had 180,000 miles on it, and had never had the trans touched (I bought it from a friend, who had it as his high school/college vehicle, and his parents bought it new)... It towed a 5000# boat down to the lake most weekends in the summer, for the first 100k of its life; then my friend's brother had it, and then he had it. It got a rust hole in the tank, and it sat for 4 years. I bought it from him, non-running, for $200. The transmission fluid looked like black oil, and smelled horrible.
I dropped the pan and changed the filter, then did a full "flush" (pouring fluid in while idling, with the cooler line off, until new fluid is seen coming out), then drove it for a week or 2, then dropped the pan and did the filter again... It ran fine for the 20k that I put on it before I sold it...
Mike