a buddy of mine changed the fluid in the diff, when he drained it we found out someone had put tranny fluid in there not the gear oil that it calls for. do u think he should look forward to diff problems later.

first thing i'd do is make sure it's not an internal leak/mixing of the front diff and trans fluid. keep an eye on the fluid levels over time, they could be mixing.

 

otherwise, yeah that's a real bad deal but not much you can do about it now. i'd imagine it has a good chance of being okay, but the good thing is that if it does fail it should give plenty of warning and shouldn't just randomly break down on you.

Hi. If it were just truly that ATF were put in instead of gear oil, if it were not run for too long/too much load, that is not a horrid problem. There was just a post where someone put gear oil into the auto trans...that is ba..d.d.d.d.

 

It may have done some extra wear on the gears, etc., since ATF does not have the E.P. (extreme pressure) additives that GL-5 gear oils have because of the hypoid gear components. But if it wasn't run for too long, I would just flush out the ATF and put in fresh gear oil and not worry about it.

Lots of manual tranny's (including FWD's with integrated diffs) now call for ATF. What do you think automatics use for their gears?

 

It shouldn't hurt it much at all really. Subaru ran ATF in the manual tranny for the Justy LSR they took to Bonneville.... It's got lower gear resistance. Makes syncro's work really smooth too. It may shorten the life of the tranny a small amount - but automatics generally have a lifespan of 250k to 300k while manuals often last 500k or more. It's not a huge difference especially if it was only run with ATF for a portion of it's lifetime.

 

GD

Yes, that's true! Subaru for the 1.0 production class world record ftw!!!!

 

Many of the modern FWD transaxles that call for ATF are tranverse mounted, and hence no high torque situations such as with the the Subaru classic hypoid front and rear diffs.

Transaxles generally only need EP additives for the differential. Mercedes-Benz has specified ATF for manual transmissions since the 1950's!

first thing i'd do is make sure it's not an internal leak/mixing of the front diff and trans fluid. keep an eye on the fluid levels over time, they could be mixing.

 

i don't think this is happening. it was at the right level and was pure atf.