The greatest money saver you will run across when your car has a major issue such as a transmission failure is to replace or repair the transmission in your car, instead of replacing the whole car.
For a car or truck that is in good overall condition you can accomplish two things, one is that your car will move again after you put a rebuilt or good used transmission in your vehicle. The other thing that happens is that now that your car runs like new again, you probably forgot how nice your vehicle ran before. Often we don’t notice the slow decline in performance and gas mileage loss during the period a transmission deteriorates and then fails because we are so used to our cars “feel”.
People often call GotTransmissions.com back to thank them and let the experts know how much they appreciate the good advise they were given in terms of what the best choice was in a replacement transmission. Surprising as it may sound, when an individual has a serious transmission problem and ultimately a failure, they suddenly realize how bad the car was running. The first thing that comes to mind upon driving the vehicle with a fresh transmission is how much different the car feels and that it would have been a waste of money to buy a new car as a knee-jerk reaction.
This is an excellent time to install or have installed by a reputable transmission shop an auxiliary external transmission cooler. It is cheap and effective at keeping your new transmission running cool.
This is the most important thing I will ever say about replacing a transmission, especially if you are a home mechanic. The transmission cooling portion of the radiator positively must be flushed or purged of the burnt contaminated automatic transmission fluid or I promise you that big time problems will occur when the cooler-muck goes right into your fresh transmission, thus causing serious problems that probably won’t be guaranteed.
Transmission repair and replacement shops use fancy equipment that force flushes a cleaning agent through the cooler lines and the cooling portion of the radiator and auxiliary cooler if so equipped. Fortunately for home mechanics there is a product on the market that is in an aerosol can that has a screw fitting that hooks to a cooler line that flushes the proper agent through the lines without the need for a fancy flushing tool. In fact many shops use this method instead of a buying an expensive flush tool. It is cheaper and very effective.
Many of the suppliers of used, rebuilt and new replacement transmissions include the aerosol cooler flush and directions for use, with the package. They don’t want any problems or excuses either. Some companies include an auxiliary cooler if the situation warrants.
When I owned my transmission shop from 1981 to 2006 (I sold it), we built excellent relationships and confidence in our customers. Customers were required to return in two weeks for a free warranty recheck of the work we performed on their tranny, almost always the first two things that came out of their mouths’ were “how wonderful their cars drive now that it was performing like it used too, and they were very pleased with their decision and happy to have kept the car and saved literally multi-thousands of dollars by not trading their car in”.
The point of this article is that is that sometimes when you understand a situation well enough to make an informed decision, not a knee-jerk decision it builds confidence in your ability to make good decisions. That almost always makes you feel good about yourself and better about your car. FYI, I still drive my 1988 GMC 1 ton pickup truck with a GMC T-700R4 transmission. I bought it new and have maintained it just like I recommend in the GotTransmissions.com Blog articles presented here for free. Enjoy.
