Flush or Drain

Oh my God, did you flush!!!???

Sorry, old joke.

But, don't! At 160,000 and you can't remember the last service, flushing my not be the thing to do.

But, a few questions first. Is the tranny fluid red, or brown, or worse, black? One of the things that makes tranny fluid change is the fact the friction material is getting eaten off of the clutches and brakes. If you flush it out, you HAVE no friction material, and you stop moving!

If it is still a light red, you may be ok. Brown or black, jut change it and clean the screen. This will replace 4-6 of the 12-16 quarts in your tranny. If this works OK, drive it for 20,000 and do it again.

As far as the power steering, I've never heard of this. I guess you can drain it and fill it. I've never done it.

You can drain about 1/3 of the trans fluid yourself for $10 - they probably want $150 for their power flush. I'd rather drain and fill for next 4 oil changes. Turkey baster can be used to suck out power steering and brak fluid for a change.

I remember hearing a song about a lady having her windshield washer fluid changed too! I have a "thing" about flushing radiator and transmission ONCE about 40 or

50 k miles and then just change. I also do diff's, transfer case every couple years or 30-40k miles. This is probably overkill but then I also do oil/filter at 3k or 3 months too. a few hundred bucks every couple of years on a 30+k car/suv is pretty inexpensive. I had radiator coolant changed today at about 62k. This is my thing but you probably won't go wrong following owners manual recommendations for severe service. Probably replacing brake fluid and power steering in reservoirs not bad idea either every few years.

Ron

At that mileage, drain and refill the transmission.

Pass on the power steering fluid flush, if you really want to, you can drain and refill.

You should change the brake fluid as well.

I used to just drive them till they drop. With a Toyota, this amounts to

250,000 miles or more.

However, I am a little more maintenance concious than I was. New cars are too expensive! This sounds like a good idea to me!

I changed the brake fluid in my '85 Corolla once...at 248,000 miles! The pedal was so hard I had to brace myself against the seat to stop the car!!! New brake fluid and it was like brand new again. Now I change it when it starts getting dark!

That's part of where they make their money is on the, um, "added services".

My regular shop doesn't like the idea of a powerflush; regardless, when I had some work done at a local dealer some months back, I let them do what they called a flush. I was pleased that I had no problems afterwards, despite all the horror stories; after relating the tale to the mechanic at my regular shop, he thinks that what they did was unplug the hose going to the tranny cooler, start the engine, and kept pouring in fresh fluid up top until the fluid coming out of the hose turned red. That way, no extra strain on the parts.