Expert: Roland Finston - 11/8/2011

Question
coolant line broke inside rad,fortunately 200 yd. from home. limped home,changed installed new rad antifreeze and new tranny filter and dealer sold me atf4.worked good for 60kms or so and suddenly nothing in any gear. turned off engine waited 5 minutes started van put in drive and headed home about a 7 klm trip.had to  shut off 4 times for 5min. to get friction. vehicule wellserviced 140000 klms on it tranny wasnt flushed by advice of a local tranny shop and chrysler service dept.fluid seems bubbley on stick and now appears to be overfull no burnt smell or discoloration. as you can probably tell i am not knowlegeable about trannys any way i think i am still contaminated but maybe its replace tranny any suggestions thanks glen

Answer
Hi Glen,
If the broken coolant line allowed the antifreeze and trans fluid to mix then I would believe that you should do a complete changeout of the transmission fluid via a powerflush machine rather than draining out, which only removes about 1/2 the fluid.  I wonder on what basis you were told not to do that? Was any reason given?
If you are lucky there is no damage to the transmission. The only other approach is to get a fault code readout of the transmission control module memory but given that the fluid may be contaminated I would not rely on that for a meaningful assessment of the transmission's present condition.
The overfill/bubbly appearance is saying that the fluid is now bad. Whether a total changeout will solve this is uncertain. But the alternative of opting to rebuild it without giving a total changeout a chance seems to me to be missing the possibility that a rebuild at $2K could be avoided. These transmissions typically begin to fail at 200k km so it may be compromised already before this happened. But there is a chance you can get it going again.
Please let me know how this works out.
Roland
PS Sorry for the delay but I just found your question in the 'pool' to which it was referred by Kevin.