I've Been Saying This for Years But You Keep Doing This to Your Transmission

now there's two super expensive things on your car there's the engine and there's the automatic transmission you don't want either of them to go out you want them to last as long as possible so here's some transmission tips most obvious boring thing is keep clean fluid in it you got to change it every so often now decades ago when i was a young mechanic we had to change automatic transmission fluid every 20 or 30 000 miles synthetic automatic transmission fluid lasts a lot longer but don't be fooled by this nonsense the people saying it's lifetime fluid you never need to change it you still need to change those two so just do that every so often it depends on each make and model you got to do a little research like nissan's heck i still do those every 30 000 miles because they're problematic transmissions but something like a toyota ah you could get away with changing the fluid every 60 80 000 miles and you probably won't have any problems but now i'm going to talk about things you might not have thought about the next thing to make your transmission last as long as possible is your tires believe it or not yes you want to have the correct tire pressure because if your tire pressure is low your tires are going to drag have more friction that makes the transmission work harder the harder it works the faster it's going to wear out and with the addition of all these modern anti-collision avoidance systems and cars abs brakes lane assistance even semi-automatic braking on some of them it's important that your tires are all exactly the same even on a two-wheel drive vehicle because it's monitoring all four wheels and crazy things can happen if it thinks that one wheel in the back is rotating at a different speed than one wheel at the front just because the tires are different sizes now another way to make them last as long as possible is this when you do change the fluid make sure you use the same fluid that came with the transmission theoretically lots of different ones can be mixed together but with additive packages and especially with these modern cvt transmissions you want to stick with the exact fluid that the vehicle came with all the modern cars come with high-tech synthetic fluid it's a very good fluid it can take heat better it lasts longer it doesn't break down as fast it's a pure type of fluid so you want to stick to that and not take a chance by putting a different type in nobody really knows what's in each of the different ones you know that if it came with one particular one you buy that same stuff that's going to have the same additives it's going to have the same exact viscosity and that's very important for a modern transmission and i know really that's one of the reasons that a lot of transmissions don't have dipsticks or drain plugs anymore because the manufacturers were worried that people are going to put the wrong kind of fluid in it and ruin the transmissions which i've seen quite a few times you really can't nowadays you're better off paying a mechanic who knows what he's doing to change your fluid in any modern car some of them have multi-step processes that can take an hour and a half including road tests hooking up a scan tool measuring temperature and pressure it gets really complicated and you don't want to put a monkey wrench in the whole thing by using the wrong type of fluid so stick to oem fluid on any modern transmission now another big tip to make your transmission last as long as possible is keep your cooling system in good shape make sure the cooling fans are working make sure there isn't any kind of blockage like paper bags or if you live out in the country a zillion bugs that have covered up your radiator and that's because most cars have transmission coolers that help cool the automatic transmission fluid they're generally built into the radiator of your car so if your radiator is running too hot that's gonna make your transmission run too hot too now big truckers have known this for years they have temperature gauges for their transmission cars don't come that way unless you special order one or put on a temperature gauge yourself you're not going to know what temperature your automatic transmission fluid is running at so really you're not even going to get a warning if your uh radiator starts to overheat sure you know you definitely need to work on it let's say that the part that cools your transmission is kind of blocked might be that your transmission is running a little bit hotter you don't have a gauge for that so this is an indirect thing make sure your cooling system is in tip top shape because that will make your transmission last longer because the main anatomy of automatic transmission is heat you want to keep friction down as much as possible just the bare running of itself creates friction you don't want to have extra friction added because the cooling system isn't helping to cool that friction down that would just make things worse if you had dirty transmission fluid and a cooling system that wasn't working right there's a double-edged sword that's going to cut through your transmission and make it wear out faster you want to make sure you got a good battery and alternator in your car because modern automatic transmissions they're all computer controlled if you don't have the correct battery voltage going if the alternator is wearing out either puts voltage surges or doesn't put enough voltage out you can have transmission problems you might not notice it much but as time goes on if the electronics are weak that can strain different parts of the transmission and cause them to break down it's a simple thing to have your mechanic load test your battery load chest your alternator every once in a while it's part of the job i do for my customers all the time journey all day when a battery was going out and you try to start the car it'll go well it won't start you know the battery's getting low but these modern cars they're completely different so these electronics i've had a lot of cars that'll just crank like mad but they still won't start and it's a weak battery because it doesn't have enough power to spin the engine and run all the electronics at the same time and since your transmission is now controlled by all this electronic stuff that makes it even more important to have a good battery an alternator because if they're not putting enough electricity out most of the sensors on those things are either a 5 volt reference signal that have very little power or 12 volt ones that still don't use all that much power and if the power has gone down they won't shift right they might not even go down the road they might just start slipping if the solenoids don't let them shift you can have all kinds of problems which leads me to another thing that i have to talk about electricity in your transmission realize that your whole transmission is grounded it's negative electricity and if the ground cable from the battery to the frame to the transmission isn't working right they can go haywire all these transmission solenoids they have to get a signal from the computer and the module yeah but they also have to have negative electricity because cars work on direct current in order for anything to work it's got to have power and it's got to have ground i've seen these things where from either corrosion or somebody worked on the car and they knocked the ground strap loose or even worse took it off and didn't put it back on that will make the transmission go haywire if it doesn't have correct ground now especially if you have cars like gm that are notorious for having ground faults in them it might not be a bad idea if you work on your own car get a good wiring diagram schematic of where all the ground wires on the car and especially the transmission ground wires and check them every once in a while when your car gets older and the last tip is this if you got a dipstick like this whole car check it every once in a while to make sure it's not losing any fluid now of course modern transmissions a lot of them don't have dipsticks anymore so it's a good idea to crawl under every once in a while and look at the transmission if it's fine it'll be bone dry but if it's all covered in oil and greasy you know something's wrong and have it looked at and have the fluid topped up if necessary because if you run a transmission when it's getting really low on fluid that'll destroy them i've had lots of customers sometimes maybe they hit something and the bottom of the pan gets a leak on the transmission and then they drive it around that way for quite some time and when they bring it to me i find the leak put a new pan on it but then they just don't work right because they were running low sucked a lot of air in and that ruined the inside of the transmission in over the last 52 years people always asking me scotty somebody's trying to tell me i need to flush my automatic transmission have it all flushed out and new fluid put in is that a good idea to which i'll generally respond no it's not a good idea now the reasoning behind flushing isn't a bad idea realize most automatic transmissions when you drain the pan take it off empty it out maybe three four quarts of fluid comes out and some of these systems hold like 14 15 quarts so a bunch of the old fluid remains inside especially inside the torque converter because it's not like flushing your radiator system out which is much simpler now radiators have tiny holes that the coolant has to go through you want to keep it clean so that all those passageways don't get clogged up and the cooling system is very simple you got a radiator it flows through you have a water pump that pumps it through the system goes through the jackets of the engine inside to take the heat from the engine and then pump and dissipate it through the radiator simple system you don't want it clogged up a mechanical or in some cases the new ones are electric pumps they still just pump the fluid so you flush it out you get all the crud out you're not going to have any problems but automatic transmissions completely different animal here automatic transmissions are very complex inside they have electric solenoids they have tiny little passageways that go by pressure differential you have dirt on your automatic transmission and you run a power flush that's power pushing the fluid through the system those tiny little holes some of the crud could be pushed into the little holes jamming them up i have seen hundreds of people have the transmission flush somewhere else they bring it to me and say scotty my transmission is slipping now or it won't go into gear or shifting rough and it wasn't doing it before i had the transmission flushed and it's true that can easily happen the best thing to do is to drop the transmission pan clean it all out and change the filter the filter is there to catch most of the crud so you drop the pan clean the dirt out in the bottom put a new filter in then the system is good to go if you do it regularly mild celica it's got 230 000 miles and the transmission still shifts like a dream mind you i change the fluid every 30 000 miles not that big of a deal i don't even worry about the filter and this because these toyota designs a lot of them don't have an actual filter they got a little screen just like a mosquito screen on the windows of your house you just clean them you don't have to replace them because there's not that much in them because realize transmission fluid is cheap transmission rebuilds and new transmissions are very expensive you don't want it to go this far you don't want a transmission that revs way too high before it starts shifting gears that's a no-no you don't want to transmission that herky jerkies when it's taken off or slips when you're trying to take off and you don't want to transmission that you put it in reverse and you step on a gas and it won't move anywhere these are all signs that you have a transmission problem you want to avoid this at all costs let's say you let it get really dirty never changed it at all then if you try to flush it all that crud is thrown through the systems as i said theoretically it sounds like a good idea you'll flush all the crud out of the system and have brand new fluid in but it often doesn't work that way not only because stuff can get clogged up but an old transmission that's worn they all run by friction the fluid has friction in it and the fluid friction helps the dynamics of making the car move down the road guess what really dirty fluid actually has more friction in it so if you change your transmission fluid by flushing it and you get all the dirty friction fluid out and put in new slippery shiny brand new fluid guess what a lot of times the transmissions will start to slip now to counteract that on a really old transmission let's say the transmission needed a shift solenoid they had to drop the pan real pro mechanics like myself they will save the old fluid and put it back in so it won't have that problem now that might sound like a stupid idea take out the old fluid replace broken parts then put that old fluid back in got a car that's got 150 200 000 miles a lot of times that is the smarter way to go with that kind of mileage you're often living on borrowed time and your borrowed time goes way down to nothing if you put in fresh fluid from really all dirty fluid so why do some mechanics and shops tell you oh we're going to flush your transmission fluid well there's two main reasons for that and numero uno is it's a profit-making thing it's like guys that say oh we have to power flush your injection system if your car's running perfectly fine you got no problems a lot of times that's just overselling something to people and flushing the transmission fluid that's an often oversold item and number two it's very easy for a shop to do it that has the equipment if you're going to change the filter and fluid you got to drop the pan a lot of the modern transmission pans don't even have gaskets they're glued on and let me tell you it is a job getting that old glue off without breaking anything you gotta hit and pry and pull it's messy you gotta buy a filter then you gotta fill it all back up but with the pressure machine automatic transmissions have cooler lines on them that go to the radiator or to a special cooler all they got to do is take those two lines off hook it to their machine and flush it through it's a very easy thing for them to do with the equipment and as most guys charge more money to flush a transmission than it just dropped the pan and change it they're making more money not a good idea to have an automatic transmission flush now yes you want to have clean fluid but if you change it often that's good enough yeah you're not changing at all you're changing some of it but you're changing it off that if you keep doing it and if it has a filter and you change that filter it's going to get rid of any problems that you're going to have in the first place and that's especially true in modern cars because the new cars most of them use a full synthetic fluid that fluid lasts longer if you're just changing a bit at a time maybe a third of what's in it when you just change the filter and fluid the old fluid mixed with the new fluid it doesn't have the degradation that the fluids did when i was a young mechanic in the 60s and they just flat wore up plus the transmissions are so much better made than they used to be back in the day almost all the american automatic transmissions they had automatic clutches inside that's what they call them automatic transmissions and they would shed a lot of clutch material and that clutch material made of asbestos of course it's going to clog stuff up well they don't make them like that anymore so you don't have to worry about the gross contamination that the older ones would get if you didn't change them a lot you're gonna have serious problems but today no the designs are better the fluids are better so you should stay away from flushing them now as far as i'm concerned there's only one exception to this rule of not flushing let's say you got a vehicle and it won't even go down the road or it slips so bad then it's almost undrivable what the heck if you want to take a gamble somebody hooking up a machine and getting all the crud out of the system especially in american automatic transmission you might give it a try if you say that hey it's gonna cost you three four grand to have a rebuilt transmission put in and it's an old car that's all worn out and it's slipping like mad or doesn't even move what the heck you might give it a wing just to see if it'll work and sometimes it will work i'll say 25 30 percent of the times that i've seen it happen like that they went back to at least drivability they could go down the road okay maybe they still slipped a little or they clunk a little but you could actually drive it when before the flush you couldn't but that's an extreme case of an extreme junker worn out vehicle don't think that if you got a modern vehicle that's got 60 70 000 miles in support design and the transmission is slipping or shifting weird that flushing is going to help that at all because you realize that automatic transmissions are very complicated and very sensitive to fluids differential pressure to the friction that's inside them it's not like engine oil okay you're driving a car your engines firing gasoline explosions there's all kinds of after effects of the burning and water vapor that get into the oil and contaminate it so that stuff's got to be changed at least once a year or every five six thousand miles in most cases and yes modern automatic transmissions they're sealed units they don't have explosions and water and stuff going inside them they are sealed as long as you don't go under water and air from the transmission bubbles out water takes its place when it's underwater because there isn't the build up like there is in an engine but over time you do get some build up just from friction things wearing pieces coming off inside so you do want to change the fluids uh maybe every 60 000 miles or something in a modern car but please listen to scotty don't get suckered into being sold a transmission flush job because then you may need a transmission overhaul job shortly after that you just weren't prepared for especially if you had a transmission that shifted perfectly fine in the first place and then it's starting to act up after the flush so now you know how to save thousands in transmission repair with some pretty simple stuff because let's face it we're all in this together we don't want to spend our hard earned money fixing an automatic transmission that we can keep from breaking in the first place so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos remember to ring that bell you

Channel: Scotty Kilmer

Views: 359,947

Keywords: 5 minute crafts, auto repair, automatic transmission, car, car advice, car diy, car engine, car hacks, car life hacks, car repair, car repairs, cars, diy, diy car repair, diy life hacks, diy projects, doing this, doing this will save you thousands in transmission repairs, expensive car repairs, expensive repairs, how to save thousands of dollars, life hack, life hacks, repair, repairs, save, save money, scotty kilmer, transmission, transmission maintenance, transmission repair

Id: SnM2Z-pwP6U

Length: 18min 50sec (1130 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020