Hey guys..

I drained the fluid today. I DID NOT drop the pan and change the filter. My plan was to drop the pan and change filter, and doing 3 more pan drains afterwards. I bought enough fluid for that. And, after that final 4th drain, enough of the fluid will be new that I can sleep at night.

Well, I didnt feel comfortable dropping the pan so I just did the drain and fill and will drop the pan on the next one in a few weeks. Remember my story: I ruined the auto tranny on a beautiful Jaguar X-type by not being careful on my fluid change. I had always owned manual trannies and I just didn't realize the improtance of fluid choice and fluid type. (It was 4 years ago, I was only 24 and fresh out of college). This is why I'm so scared to touch auto trannies today, and its why I ditched the Jag for a 'dumb design' Mustang GT that was basically impossible to mess up. But I'm back baby!

So, some notes:

1. At 28K, the fluid was brown. Not nearly black, but certainly not red. It was a healthy brown. I believe it was on par with the Mercedes TSB about changing the fluid in these trannies at 39K. I can picture it being still brown, but thicker, in 11K miles.

2. The pan drain bolt was insanely hard to remove. It had to have loktite on it. I had to use a long breaker bar to break it loose but I was terrified I was going to just break the bolt head completely.

3. Don't freak out about the lock tab on the refill plug. Stay calm. Its easy to remove just study it first and pry it out. Its not way down behind the engine like on some Mercedez (I think) its instead extended and right there by the battery. Breathe.

4. My plan was to shoot the pan with infrared to measure the temperature while measuring the fluid. Before doing this I instead used an empty liter oil bottle and poured the old fluid into this. Each filled liter of the old fluid meant 1 new liter of new fluid poured in. It was very accurate and made me feel better. Then when I was done I did the warmup in drive, shot the pan, checked at 80 celsius. It measured right below the correct area, not even a millimeter. I said forget it, I'm done. I'm draining and refilling in a week or 2 anyways. Overfilling is worse than underfilling so I"ll stick with this.

So, thats my story. I'll update this thread the next time I do it assuming I do the pan and filter also, which I'm almost sure I will.