ATF chang on 97 corolla.

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MrCPU

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Well, technically a geo, but I digress. Pan has a drain valve. I dont' have a torque wrench that measure inch pounds, so I'm hoping the 90k tranny service included a new filter (before I bought the car), and I'm just going to change the fluid, (so I have a known starting point), pour in the ARX and go for it.

If I have a drain plug, do I really really, really need to drop the pan? It looks like justabout the lowest spot.

I have not found the lines from the cooler, if there is one, to know which is what to drain the torque converter.

Any downside to just 3 cycles of drain, run, drain, run, drain?
 
Drain the fluid first since you have the luxury of a drain plug and then drop the pan so you can change the filter.

You can use a short 1/4 drive ratchet and extension for the pan bolts and not have to worry about over tightening. Grab the ratchet like you would a T handle by having the extension going between your middle and index fingers; this will allow you to tighten the bolts by just using your wrist.
 
I guess what I'm confused on, is if you drop the pan, change the filter, then do you have to put more ATF in before you try to drain the torque converter? Like put fresh in the pan so it gets drawn in, and old gets pumped out?

I think I'm missing a fundamental step.
 
Usually the torque converter doesn't get drained unless the FSM specifically mandates it. You just install your filter, place a new gasket on the pan, then just bolt it up. You pour in about 3-4 quarts of ATF fluid, (which would roughly equal what was lost from the pan) start up the engine, place the gear selector in drive with the emergency brake on and check the fluid level. Add additional fluid as necessary.
 
I had a 98 Corolla 3 speed auto and there was actually two chambers that were independently filled with ATF. One was the actual pan section that got changed and the second chamber was a gearbox section. A pan drop ATF change will not change out the gearbox section of the tranny. Access to the gearbox was between the drivers side firewall and the tranny. Not fun.
 
If you have gone 90K on OEM ATF you need to drop a bottle of Auto-Rx and nothing else in that transmission and drive it 1000 miles! Then you need to drain it and put 4 quarts of Maxlife in it. rive it another 1000 miles drain it replaces the filter and gasket and refill with another roughly 4 quarts of Maxlife ATF! Do not argue just do it!

That transmission is going to be so dirty that if you do not do an Auto-Rx on it first you will be sorry. Auto-Rx is perfectly safe it is great for the seals and gentle. Read about it on their site! The first fluid drain and refil is to get some of the garbage that Auto-Rx disolved that could cause your seals to dry up and harden out of the transmission. The second one is to finish the job. After that change that fluid every 25,000 miles with Maxlife ATF!
 
Originally Posted By: JohnBrowning
If you have gone 90K on OEM ATF you need to drop a bottle of Auto-Rx and nothing else in that transmission and drive it 1000 miles! Then you need to drain it and put 4 quarts of Maxlife in it. rive it another 1000 miles drain it replaces the filter and gasket and refill with another roughly 4 quarts of Maxlife ATF! Do not argue just do it!

That transmission is going to be so dirty that if you do not do an Auto-Rx on it first you will be sorry. Auto-Rx is perfectly safe it is great for the seals and gentle. Read about it on their site! The first fluid drain and refil is to get some of the garbage that Auto-Rx disolved that could cause your seals to dry up and harden out of the transmission. The second one is to finish the job. After that change that fluid every 25,000 miles with Maxlife ATF!
yah, whatever. I ran the AT to 345kmiles on WALMART Supertech dino DexIII. with filter changes every 75-100k whether they needed it or not. Trans worked fine when I retired the car due to rust issues.
 
Originally Posted By: JohnBrowning
If you have gone 90K on OEM ATF you need to drop a bottle of Auto-Rx and nothing else in that transmission and drive it 1000 miles! Then you need to drain it and put 4 quarts of Maxlife in it. rive it another 1000 miles drain it replaces the filter and gasket and refill with another roughly 4 quarts of Maxlife ATF! Do not argue just do it!

That transmission is going to be so dirty that if you do not do an Auto-Rx on it first you will be sorry. Auto-Rx is perfectly safe it is great for the seals and gentle. Read about it on their site! The first fluid drain and refil is to get some of the garbage that Auto-Rx disolved that could cause your seals to dry up and harden out of the transmission. The second one is to finish the job. After that change that fluid every 25,000 miles with Maxlife ATF!


Bottle of auto-rx is already sitting here ready to go. I wonder why they don't want fresh tranny fluid in there to run through it like they do for the oil? (which also has been arx'd).

I do not believe it is the original factory atf, but I don't know for sure.

Only deviation from your recipe is I'll be using the supertech dexron III. Gonna pour in super-tech everywhere, see what happens.
 
Just drain out the 4 qts. and be done with it. You can get a gallon jug of Pennzoil Dexron III @ WALMART. Don't fuss about the filter as its just a metal screen in there... designed for true lifetime service. Do this service annually and it'll be the best $12 you ever spent, just be sure to pick-up a new gasket for drain bolt!
 
Good. Unlike the guy that got lucky and neglected his ATF and still got great life out of his transmission it is far better to service them on a more freq. basis! Especialy since Toyota is nice enough to give you a drain plug. If you drain and refill them freq. you can go a long long time between filter changes. My Mother Tundra recomends 16,000 mile ATF fluid changes. i normal do her's every 18,000 miles since I use M1 ATF. Here Tundra was before they went to T-IV so it came with Dex-III from Toyota.

Normaly on a new transmission best policy is to exchange the fluid at 10,000 miles then every 25K-50K miles depending on how the vechile is used,fluid capacity and what type of base stock the fluid is ie synthetic or dino!

I have used SuperTech and it is low grade stuff. It will work but it shears quickly and does not have great oxidation resistance. I have also used their SupeTech High Milage ATF and it is a little bit better then the standard stuff. I use SuperTech int he wifes car. GM did a bad job on her OEM trans so it had to have a new one from the salvage yard. I hhope the one fromt he Salvage yard had the recomended TSB fix under warranty or it will end up doing the same thing that the wifes OEM one did!

Automatics do not usualy die from wearing out the hard parts in most modern car's and trucks bareing serious abuse like hard core towing or off roading. Normaly the seals get hard and dryed out then crack. This is normaly caused buy oxidation of the fluid from a combination of heat and time. Buy staying ahead of the oxidation you stay ahead of the varnish and dry rot and shrinkage and hardening of seals etc....The way you stay ahead of oxidation is to change the fluid out before it is spent. Once the seals start to get hard then fluid leaks past them and clamping force and timeing is affected. Sooner or latter this causes accelerated wear from slipping or the transmisssion get's stuck in a gear.

Their are some synthetic fluids that can make it to some extremely long OCI's but nothign I have seen from an OEM can make it to 100,000 miles and still be in good shape. In fact I used to see a large number of Gm 4 speed automatice from Full size trucks that wher enever used like trucks they where just daily drivers that died around 75,000 miles due to nothing else but lack of oil changes. Gm listed the service life of the automatic transmission fluid as 100,000 miles change interval. Longstory short Dex-III could never make it 100,000 miles and still be in grade or have decent TAN numbers at 100,000 miles.

If you do some home work the transmission industry has recomendations that fall in line with mine even though they make their money selling you a knew transmission. In fact everything I know about automatics and life cycles and how best to keep them happy for a long long time I learned from Eaton engineers while I was working for GM. I did some quality control work amoung other things for them. So Ihad to interact with engineeers from a lot of different companies and their top excutive staff. How these guys service their own vechiles is a lot different from how GM recomends you service the vechile.

If you want to fill this thing up and not have to worry about doing it again until it crocks then you need to go big ticket and fill it up with an ester based ATF like Redline's D4. In your applications if you can completly drain and refill it includeing the T/C you would come close to haveing a fill for life situation even though I hate the idea of that!
 
John Browning , mebbe a POS GM trans needs more TLC than A Getrag 4HP22. I have over a million total miles on this trans spread over 4 cars. The only problem I have had was a blown out lip seal in a car that had only 6k miles put on it in 13 yrs. I just change fluid and filters as needed. Super tech DexIII has to meet the same specs as the better advertised stuff.
 
No it does not have to since Dex-III is no longer liscensed buy GM their is no offical spec. to meet. Then you have meeting a spec. barley and grossly exceeding a spec.! Their is no way that SuperTech's DexIII is in the same catoagor as M1 ATF. First the Walmart stuff is made buy the lowest biffer which is usualy costal in most area's. Costal does not use cutting edge additives or top notch base stock's and their price reflects this! Their quality control is not that great either as we have seen batch's of SuperTech gear oil that was almost entirely devoid of additives. So you can sell that SuperTech is just as good as the more expensive stuff to someone else. labtests do not lie niether do field trial. As a trained mechanic and forensic tear down specialist I see hundreds of failed engines each year and transmissions whell I did for a while at least. Then as a mechanic I again saw all kinds of variety in the maintence and quality of products used on vechiles. Car people talk and they talk alot you do not have to asktwice for them to share what theya re useing or doing. Then you have personel experince as an owner and operator of a variety of vechiles. Then their are the personal accounts from this site. You take all of that and add it up and that will get you closer to the truth then just your personel experince with one type of transmission not even related to the transmission in question. It sound to me like you are either lucky or easy on transmissions or both. Some of us have rather high standards for the level of cleanliness we want in our equipment as well. I will agree that most of GM's automatics are POS due to poor quality or materials used in other wise sound designs. It does not change though what a best practice is. Best practice is not about going [censored] long as you can between maintence intervals and hopeing for the best. Best practice is usualy set by the marginal return method. So if you over do something you pay more in the long run then you get out of your investment in this case durability based on statistical anallysis(sp)of failures in like products.
 
Well, I have the ST ATF now, and I'm running a batch of ARX through it. Mebbe Ill send off a virgin sample to Blackstone for grins and giggles.

I looked for the ST dexron VI, but they only had a couple of quarts on the shelf.

I think I"ll just drain the pan, and be done with it. Nobody in town has the gasket for the pan in stock, and I've waited 3 days on 2 shops to get it, and nobody seems to get it. And Im leaving on a tripin 2 days, so the tranny will just have to cope with the ST stuff and a drain for now.

I had no idea I needed a new gasket for the drain bolt. I don't think my haynes manual mentions that little detail.
 
The Camry I have also has a screen not a filter. After having replaced that screen 3 times in its 197,000 miles I have decided that it was a waste of time and money, it was always clean. This camry also has two drains, differential has a small ATF capacity which does mix with the transmission fluid pan and more difficult to get to.

ANyway, been using Amsoil ATF since the first change at 25,000 and do a drain and fill every 30,000 or so. Do use Lubeguard but not sure that makes any difference.
On the other hand my Merc Mystique was done with Amsoil in the same manner and it failed at 145,000. A lot has to do with good genes. You can eat right, excersize etc but if the genes are bad you still die young, same with transmissions
 
Just a comment regarding the two different trans Toyota used in these cars -- the posts speaking about two different fill spots fot the trans is correct. I've found that the 3-speed auto trans had a seperate differential sump, thus different drain/refill plug. This is the one that several have referred to has hard to get to -- refill plug faces the rear of car, very difficult to get a oil suction gun tube in. This 3-spd trans has a normal pan w/ drain plug as well as the metal screen filter that is referred to.

The four speed auto-trans has the normal pan w/ drain plug only, and the differential is lubed by the trans fluid.

How to easily tell which trans? The four speed trans has a push button type switch on the shifter to lock out overdrive, the 3-speed does not.
 
Originally Posted By: Market525
Just a comment regarding the two different trans Toyota used in these cars -- the posts speaking about two different fill spots fot the trans is correct. I've found that the 3-speed auto trans had a seperate differential sump, thus different drain/refill plug. This is the one that several have referred to has hard to get to -- refill plug faces the rear of car, very difficult to get a oil suction gun tube in. This 3-spd trans has a normal pan w/ drain plug as well as the metal screen filter that is referred to.

The four speed auto-trans has the normal pan w/ drain plug only, and the differential is lubed by the trans fluid.

How to easily tell which trans? The four speed trans has a push button type switch on the shifter to lock out overdrive, the 3-speed does not.


I have a 94 Camry with 4 cyl and 4 speed auto. It has a seperate
diff. one needs to service. I have Amsoil ATF in it.
 
had a huge disagreement with Toyota tech and Toyota central on whether the ATF in the differential actually mixced with the ATF in the transmission pan. Corporate said no, does not mix thus the separate plug etc. Tech said they do.

Only after doing it myself did I realize corporate was wrong, if you continue to fill the transmission fluid via the dipstick it does eventually come out as excess in the differential case. Thus, really no need to drain both but if you want to get as much out as possible then both should be drained and refilled. They do mix together.
 
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