On my way home tonight my transmission overheated and blew up. Needless to say I'm not to happy about this. It has been serviced twice since I've owned the car, now with 125k on it. Is there any chance this could happen from to much fluid? I checked to see if it was one of the lines and found it was coming out from the vent on top of the tranny. The dipstick still shows the level being 3 inches above the full mark. Thoughts?

 

its only been serviced 3 times in 125k miles??? that could be the culprit there.. it should be drained and filled ateast every 10-15k miles esp if you are using dino dexIII.. as far as it being overfilled i dont see how that would blow up your tranny. but i could be wrong.

 

Actually- I think if his tranny has been serviced twice in 125k, his tranny is fresher than 80% of the motoring public. Some cars don't get it at all and run a long time.

That being said, what symptoms is it showing? I am assuming that it didn't actually explode...

IS it failing to move in any gear? Does it do anything at all? You need to be more specific with the symptoms.

The fluid level concerns me. Are you checking it as per the manual? How long since you last put oil in it?

 

If it really is overfilled by that much (assuming you're checking the level right), I'd be very concerned. The first thing I'd suspect is the radiator ATF cooler has ruptured and you have coolant filling the tranny now, which is very bad. If that was the case you would have ATF that looks something a strawberry milk shake.

Check this out:
https://www.yotatech.com/forums/f2/r...-fluid-116812/

And this:
https://www.yotatech.com/forums/f2/d...diator-134072/

Here's another one:
https://www.yotatech.com/forums/f2/t...-burst-126886/

 

If it is over filled then it's as bad as it being low on fluid. When the fluid is too high the mechanical components aerate the fluid. This could be exactly why your tranny failed. Now you need to find out why it was overfilled.