at long last mazda is finaly working on my transmission, i only had to request to drie out with a tech, and one ackward stare at me later they bring the guy out, and tada transmission being worked on

 

thats good to hear. seems to be like pulling crocodile's teeth to get the dealer to do any trans work...

 

rebuilding a trans is not fun, or profitable, for the tech. especially when they have other things probably waiting which they could make doubletime on. thats why its difficult. warranty time for rebuilding a trans is ****.

kevin.

 

seems to me that the easiest way to do it would be to simply replace the trans.. perhaps much more expensive to the dealership but quicker none the less..

 

believe me the techs feel the same way, but mazda generally prefers to rebuild transmissions, especially if its just synchros grinding.

Generally when we check kover a trans we go over it as close as possible to find any defective pieces. generally any damage to one of the shaft's gears will get a new trans, but i've had to replace almost everything in a trans before with mazda never considering replacing it.

honestly i'd love to be able to just diag the trans as bad and replace the whole unit, on an rx8 that would be like 1.5 hours worth of work tops, miatas too (gotta love rwd)

but alas we rebuild. hell im pretty sure chrysler still rebuilds their automatics! thank god we just swap those with remans.

kevin.

 

well it wasnt getting mazda to fix it as to making them listen to what i said to reproduce the problem, i eventually just asked for a tech let him drive and told him to down shift in to 5th gear

o well but ive meet retarded dealerships, one wouldnt work on my squeaky front seat because i had the back ones out for cleaning and running a wire to the trunk

 

Yea that kind of miscommunication normally is due to the writer but sometimes techs are grumpy and dont want to go for a drive lol.

at least you reproduced it for him and will be getting it repaired.

kevin.

 

Heh, I'm in a similar situation. My trans would crunch/grind going from 4->5 or 6->5 over 3500RPM when the trans was hot (not just the engine, you couldn't just let it idle up to temp, you had to drive it for a while).

My first visit with a laundry list of small things got me a "We can't reproduce the problem but we found strange purple fluid in the trans. Mazda says the first step in troubleshooting is to replace with Mazda Liquid Gold(tm) {just kidding}". Sounded feasible so I payed the $60-something for new gear oil.

Crap, problem still there. I took it back in when I could get time off work (tough to do in IT consulting) and the weather didn't suck (so I could drive fast on the interstates, get things nice and warm and reproduce the problem ahead of time). I only sat in the waiting area for 15 minutes before they called me back to the counter to say that the issue is internal to the transmission and the Enterprise rep would be by shortly to set me up with a rental (he asked what I was driving and winced when I said "RX-8"; "All we have is a Mazda5 and some Cobalts").

The service writer did say something odd, though: "Anymore Mazda just tells us to swap the transmission and send them the bad one for analysis." I thought that sounded odd. First, how many transmission repairs are they doing? Second, are there greater issues than just the 5th gear synchro warranting a replacement or is it just that one part and she's pulling my leg?

Czar, just out of curiousity, what gear oil were you using in the tranny?

 

Its the royal purple. I used the stuff less than 5,000 miles and I had the whole "can't shift into gears while transmission is hot" problem.

I switched to redline and the problem went away replaced by a new problem. A loud whirr noise from the transmission.

Car is at the dealership now getting worked on. My best advice is keep OEM transmission fluid or maybe try redline.

 

Yah, definitely going to go with something not GL-5 when I get the car back.

 

i was using redline mt90, right now i am using what ever they put in to it