How much damage could it cause to overfill an automatic transmission? About how much would it cost to repair?

 

If it's caught early enough it won't do a damage. I usually use a suction tube to remove it from the dipstick. Works nicely if you make the tube go in just to the "full" mark of the dipstick.
If it has already foamed and therefore slipped or destroyed a bearing or two only a teardown will show what's wrong.

HTH

AlpineRAM

 

Isnt there a over flow valve or something like that?

 

i have never seen a dodge trans harmed by being over full. i have seen a bunch damaged because of being low on fluid. if one over fills it will blow fluid out the vent until it reaches a level that it can live with. always makes a mess. always run mine at least 1 qt. over. really dont need any negative comments on this. i built my first dodge trans. 1964 still build one once in a while. on this subject one of gm od trans i always overfilled with 4 qts. with no ill efects.

 

See, here is the problem. This is a F150 trans out of a 2002-3 (cant remember which year). The machine in the shop at work malfuntioned and over filled the guys transmission and my boss chewed my butt for causing him over 300 bucks in damage to the F150 tranny from over filling it.

I dont honestly consider it to be my fault the machine broke. I checked before starting up the flush on how to do it with one of the senior techs. When it malfuntioned the first thing I did was shut it down and go to the said tech and get help. He did exactly what I did and it malfunctioned again. We then got a more experianced tech and it did it again. I was then told to put the dipstick back in and we were not going to charge the man for the work. Then I get my butt chewed on 3 weeks later and told that I totally f'ed up the guys truck, and told by my boss that I should have gone and gotten help if I didnt know what I was doing. Needless to say I am slightly POed on the matter. While I understand that since I was the tech who was assigned the truck to work on its my responsibility, if the equipment I am working with doesnt work I dont feel its my responsibility if the truck gets messed up. It would be like the alignment rack being messed up so every vehicle I work on with that goes out pulling to the right (yes I know, test drive it and dont let it go out that way and I do test drive them first to check my work but you get the point).

I havent taken a tranny class at school yet, and dont have any ASE on it so wasnt clear on what type of damage I could have caused by that so I am curious if there really could be over 300 bucks in damage.


Ah well, this is why your toolbox has wheels on it. At least that is what my instructor says.

 

I'm with jughead, "I have never seen a dodge trans harmed by being over full". My buddy has a full DTT trans and was told to overfill it. I overfill mine by 1/2 quart.

 

sorry to hear of your problem. i was blamed for putting type-f in a chebby trans one time. gm said that was what caused it to break. never had a failure that i could blame on fluid type either. had a few that i wish i could have. the gm trans that i overfilled by 4 qts. had type-f in it. last time i saw it i had over 200k on it. the dealer had it out 3 times in 30k before i got it. maybe i was just lucky.