To Flush or not to Flush?

slh1000 · 10-25-2007

Hello!

I have a question about flushing a transmission and I thought I would come here to ask.

I took my 05 Civic EX SE in for the 40,000 maintenance and they said I needed to flush my transmission fluid because it was brown and dirty. Brown and dirty? Isn't that normal? I asked another mechanic who didn't look at the car and they said not to flush it.

After reading some posts on here I'm confused whether flushing will be good or bad for my transmission? Whether it will stir up debris?

Any information would be great!

Da1lyDr1ver · 10-25-2007

flushing transmissions has been long debated. many people have said flushing a automatic tranny out completely would cause the debris inside the transmission to get stuck in the torque converter and various spots, causing the transmission to fail.

i would suggest, as well as many others, to just to a drain and refill. you can keep your fluid cleaner by doing more frequent drain and refills, instead of waiting for the recommended 50,000 mi change intervals.

automatic transmission fluid is red in color, as it gets dirty, it turns brown; an indicator that it needs to be changed.

gearbox · 10-25-2007

drain and refill, just like the manual says.

rutscivic · 10-25-2007

i work for Honda...we jus drain and fill trannys every 30,000

bomerman19 · 10-25-2007

Mr. Tatsuru Ichishima the technical advisor from spoon sports says never flush!!!

he says it on best motoring's honda tuning V-TEC club dvd

TemjinX2 · 10-26-2007

yeah just drain it and refill. You can go about 30k on it if you do mostly high way. I would change it a little sooner if you do a lot of city. Your first transmission fluid change is probably going to be really dirty just because there still metal shards in the tranny from when you were first breaking in the car.

After that is should be pretty clean. i changed it again after another 20k and the fluid was still pretty red, so i went back to changing it every 30k-40k. But i did a lot highway driving at the time.

gearbox · 10-26-2007

yea red = still good. black is bad.

slh1000 · 10-28-2007

Thanks everyone for the information. I will only refill!