differential? they're only on rear wheel drive cars, right?
WRONG
your avalon has one too.
it's dead between the axles (as it should be - lol!). it has a drain plug that takes the same big metric allen wrench as the transmission pan plug. it has a fill "bolt" that's a 14 or 15mm, nice and shiny, up about half way on the rear of the cast aluminum case.
i've been procrastinating about draining and filling mine 'cause my car is never level when it's up on jack stands - one end or the other is elevated, usually the front.
today i was working on the front suspension, looking for that goddam wheel hop. i used my floor jack to raise the rear while the front was on the stands. i have to buy a rotor to be rid of the wheel hop - weird - really weird.
the differential takes atf - NOT 90 weight gear lube. it has its own lubricant, which is not shared with the transmission.
anyhow, i drained it. it was nasty, full of metal and silvery looking. i'm sure the toyota factory put the stuff in there... replaced the drain plug and removed the filler plug.
i went down to o'riley's and bought a can of greased lightning teflon treatment ($6). i put half of it in the differential using a funnel with a long plastic hose attached (easy to find and cheap to buy). then about a quart of atf filled it. it's full when the fill hole overflows.
the result? a marginally quieter ride and peace of mind. and there's nothin' like peace of mind
Yes, I was surprised at a front wheel drive car having a differential too. Had never heard of this before...only "transaxles" (transmission and differential as a unit). Oh well...
I recently serviced the diff on our '96 Avy. It was a very simple job; you just need to make sure you have a pumping device (either rotary or plunger) to get the ATF from the bottle up to the fill hole. That, and as you mentioned get the car as level as possible.
We're talking DIFFERENTIAL (not transmission) fluid change here, right? Maybe I'll take another look, but when I did this a few weeks ago I didn't see any practical way of getting a funnel into the tight space between the engine and firewall just above the diff fill hole. I followed the factory manual, which suggested pumping the fluid in from below the car; in any event, it was a cinch doing it that way.
My '96 most definitely has a separate fill plug for the diff; filling through the tranny dipstick tube fills ONLY the tranny. I'm wondering if Toyota made a design change in later years...hence the confusion.
there ARE advantages in not reading the manual, at times... rofl
being ignorant, i just went ahead and jambed the funnel down between the air duct and some other stuff.
my life has been like that - i habitually fail to read where someone else told me i couldn't do it, then i just do it! and if/when i do read about how i can't do it, welllll, i consider why they told me that and then, in many instances, i still do it.
my interaction with foreign cars goes back a long way. first, i'm OLD - lol - older than dirt (well, young dirt, anyhow...) i turned wrenches in my youth and it was not long before i figured out that the guys that worked strictly foreign made more - a LOT more! now nobody makes a decent living turning wrenches - 50/50 commission is a thing of the past and at $12-14/hr they're supposed to own $10,000 worth of tools... so if you ever wonder why your local auto repair facility is full, to overflowing with morons, well, now you know.
there was an english car - an austin, i think (but since i'm old i can't remember all that well - rofl!) it's downfall was that the engine and the transmission shared the same oil. an inordinately stupid thing, that... the chunks of metal flaking off the gears in the standard trans getting into the oil pump and the bearings...
i seriously doubt that your trans shares the same lube as the differential. it may be so, but methinks not. although automatic, i'm pretty sure the trans would not appreciate the metal flaking off the gearset in the differential!
i could be wrong. i often am... but i habitually go with what makes sense.
Last edited by The Digital MagE; 07-13-2010 at 07:25 PM.
my interaction with foreign cars goes back a long way. first, i'm OLD - lol - older than dirt (well, young dirt, anyhow...) i turned wrenches in my youth and it was not long before i figured out that the guys that worked strictly foreign made more - a LOT more! now nobody makes a decent living turning wrenches - 50/50 commission is a thing of the past and at $12-14/hr they're supposed to own $10,000 worth of tools... so if you ever wonder why your local auto repair facility is full, to overflowing with morons, well, now you know.
there was an english car - an austin, i think (but since i'm old i can't remember all that well - rofl!) it's downfall was that the engine and the transmission shared the same oil. an inordinately stupid thing, that... the chunks of metal flaking off the gears in the standard trans getting into the oil pump and the bearings...
i seriously doubt that your trans shares the same lube as the differential. it may be so, but methinks not. although automatic, i'm pretty sure the trans would not appreciate the metal flaking off the gearset in the differential!
i could be wrong. i often am... but i habitually go with what makes sense.
On my front wheel drive 99 avalon, there is a transfer case (which I believe we have been incorrectly calling a differential) which shares atf with the trans. They are both filled thru the atf dipstick even though they each have their own drain plug. ATF fills the tranny and then overflows into the transfer case. Our 99 lexus rx300 had all wheel drive. It had a transfer case for the front wheels (almost identical set-up as the 99 avalon) and a differential to transmit power to the rear wheels. This differential took gear oil.
there was an english car - an austin, i think (but since i'm old i can't remember all that well - rofl!) it's downfall was that the engine and the transmission shared the same oil. an inordinately stupid thing, that... the chunks of metal flaking off the gears in the standard trans getting into the oil pump and the bearings...
i seriously doubt that your trans shares the same lube as the differential. it may be so, but methinks not. although automatic, i'm pretty sure the trans would not appreciate the metal flaking off the gearset in the differential!
Well, at least the Austin was in good company. In the late 1960s when Lamborghini introduced its radical (for the time) new Miura, its V12 engine and transmission shared the same lubricant. Of course, it was a bonehead design and was changed a couple years later. Today Miuras are collector cars worth hundreds of thousands.
That said, all the Hondas I've owned have had their transmission integrated with their final drive (i.e., "transaxle") sharing the same lubricant, and I've never had any problems. They haven't utilized any kind of filter either; just a magnetic drain plug. My '96 Accord had 275K on it and was still going strong when it was stolen in January.
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