Question for any of you who have done your own transmission fluid/pan service. Did you clean (with brake cleaner) and reuse your old screen filter or did you buy a new filter??

The reason I ask, before I started my 30K tranny flush, I added an auxillary cooler (easy) and dropped the pan to clean it and change the filter. Well, low and behold, late Saturday evening after dropping the pan I find that my 'good ole' parts guy gave me a completely WRONG filter. So, I called every part shop in town (the one's that werer open late Saturday/Sunday anyway) and NOBODY has one in stock for a '01 4Runner.

I angrily wait till today (Monday) to call around again for a new one. First place I call is the local Toy dealership. The parts guys says he does stock new tranny filters for those cause his service guys "clean them with brake cleaner and reuse them cause there just a screen type filter".

Any of you ever clean and reuse or do you buy new?? Is reusing a good or bad idea?

 

I just re and re'd mine and reused it after backflushing with brake fluid. It's a metal screen as you know so it should be okay for a lot longer. Just my humble opinion. Did you get the showert of fluid from your filter as you were remomving it as well?

 

I did mine also several time and just reused the original filter. I cleaned it with brake cleaner and then used compressed air to blow it dry. When I first went to do it I bought a filter too but they all looked like crappy quality and didn't see any reason for paying full price from a dealer. Now I change the fluid in the pan about every 5 oil changes (so like 15K miles) then do the filter every 45K to 60K. Keeps here runnin nice and the fluid is sparkling clean. I do need to bleed the blakes soon....fluid is getting very dirty......same goes with the diffs.

 

No. I missed the shower. My '01 has a drain plug on the tranny pan, so I popped that open an let it do its thing for almost an hour while I was putting theauxillary cooler on.

My next project is the replacing the gear box fluids (w/ Amsoil) and a brake fluid flush.

Thanks for the input guys! I'll clean the filter and pan the brake cleaner and filler up.