Definitely is. I saw that you've just joined, and thought you might not have found the thread in the DIY section. Didn't mean to come across as "Search, noob."

You should look for that thread, though, even if all your questions seem to be answered here. It's accumulated over the years. It covers one of about everything that might go wrong...including why you should remove the fill plug first.

Ken

 

if you open the drain plug first and all the oil comes out and then can't get the fill plug open you've got a real PITA situation to deal with, it has happened ...

 

well i did see the DIY on this, but it didn't answer the mail, so that is when i saw the thread "change tranny oil", in which i thought the answer would surely be... and i pretty much got it... thanks
]

 

thnx to the awesome diy by pics in this forum, i did mine and it was straight forward. i did need to invent a way to crawl underneath my car while holding my royal purple bottle upside down connected to a rubber hose to fill my tranny and differential.

yamajj

 

Just changed mine today after only 2500 miles. I've read several posts that indicate that it is wise to change early since there is a good chance of metal filings to be present.

In any event, changed the oil with pure Synthetic and the thing shifts WAY better than before.

 

you could always just pour it through the shifter hole no?

 

Okay, question: I haven't seen anything about the transmission fluid filter or pan gasket in this thread, and everyone including Mazda told me I would have to change them w/ the fluid. How difficult is it to change this yourself? Everyone in my family who works on cars are all about American Muscle and hot rods, and...they loathe my car I love my car, but the extent of car know-how ends at adding gas and oil (guess I'm the typical useless girl when it comes to cars...lol not that I'm saying all girls are useless when it comes to cars; I know that's not true, so don't bash me please...I'm useless, though lol).

Basically, is it worth the extra $70 to have Mazda change it ($100 for parts or $170 to have Mazda change the fluid and put the parts on), or is it really that easy? My husband doesn't really like working on my car (he's a stinking Mustang guy...boo), but he has before when necessary.

 

Nicole,

You may wish to search for threads regarding automatic transmissions - this one is regarding the very simple manual transmission fluid change. Myself, I would have the dealer do my auto transmission flush if I had one. But that figures that I wanted an automatic in the first place, and thus did not want to do many things manually, like shifting gears or flushing fluids.

(More seriously, though, an ATF change is often a "flush", and for that you want to both be quite careful and have the capability of flushing the fluid through using more than gravity. Careful though - some believe that flushes do more harm than good. Consult your dealer?)

 

ATF needs to be flushed from the cooler. It can be done with compressed air, but a power flusher may be better. If you don't have an air compressor, forget about it.