2003 V6 AWD 355k miles, original owner.
Coast:
From my research into the matter, early HL transmissions all came with screens from the factory. The dealer service shop would service the transmission, clean the screen and reinstall it. However a lot of non-dealer service shops would unknowingly discard the screen and replace it with a filter. The screen and the filter outer bodies look almost identical.
Anyway, at some point Toyota factory began to install nothing but filters in the new HL's. Exactly when this happened is unclear. I suspect by the 2006 model year they had gone to filters.
To my knowledge one cannot buy a replacement screen any longer. So you are pretty much stuck with installing a filter when you service the transmission. However, when you pull the existing element check inside to see if it is a screen. If it is you can reuse it. If it is a filter, replace it.
Best of Luck, Haya....

 

My 05 has a filter and was replaced with a filter.

 

Well to this day if you go to a dealer (as I do) they do a drain/fill. IMO as long as nothing really wrong the trans will likely last as long doing that as going through dropping the pan

 

Aha! I just realized something. Those cryptic numerics in the comments of the Toyota parts database, which I had thought might refer to VIN number ranges, or to the last six digits of the VIN... they're actually most likely calendar date ranges for production.

To wit: "200509 to 200612" == September 2005 to December 2006.

I'll confirm this with a Toyota parts professional.

 

Greetings. Proverbial long-time lurker, first-time poster. I hope to be able to eventually contribute as much useful info to the forum as I've gathered from it!

I have RTFMed and also carefully searched every archived post on this particular topic, though, and I am still at a loss to know how to proceed. Am hoping that the regulars here can line me up with correct guidance. You seem to be a top notch group.

Vehicle: '06 Highlander, V6 non-hybrid, 4WD. 103K miles. Serviced mainly at stealerships up till now with an occasional foray to Iffy Lube. I've been doing basic maint since roughly 95K when a family member handed the HL off to us. Ready to step up to more advanced maint tasks, including all of the transmission and driveline fluids. None of those have ever been changed so far as I can tell.

My understanding -- which may be deficient -- is that this generation of HL (and Lex RX) typically came with a re-usable metal-screened "oil strainer" internal to the transmission, rather than a disposable internal filter using fabric media. And that dealer techs would simply clean the screen and reinstall it if the pan had been removed.

Running a lookup via the Toyota corporate parts database, with the VIN for the vehicle, does now show a "TRANSMISSION FILTER", p/n 3533008010, which by appearances has filter media rather than a simple screen.

I gather from previous posts here that the disposable filter can also be distinguished by its having a ridged or corrugated metal shell, as distinct from the smooth metal shell of the screen-based oil strainer. The database image is of a ridged component.

My personal inclination if I drop the pan and find a strainer is to replace it with a bona fide filter. Big believer here in keeping fine particles of wear metals out of the moving parts (and the solenoids!).

But... does a filter, as opposed to a strainer screen, fit correctly on this vehicle? The Toyota database is cryptic on this point.

The "transmission filter" entry in the database is tagged with the words "From 200301 to 200509. From 200509 to 200612. From 200612 on."

Is this referring to VIN number ranges? The last six digits of the VIN? Because the vehicle's got a VIN well below the lowest number shown there.

I guess I also need to replace the "GASKET, OIL STRAINER", p/n 9008030077.

If any of you have successfully retrofitted a filter in place of an OE oil strainer, I'd be much indebted to you if you could relay your experiences, what worked, and/or what might not work. Thanks in advance!

I have a 2004 highlander V6 with 205,000 miles and have replaced the filter twice. No screen on mine .

 

Okay. I got the pan off. Survey says... yes, there was an actual SPX Filtran filter installed inside.

I had provisioned a brand new OE filter, which was identical to the previously installed filter in every way other than not being filthy (the removed filter had gray sediment all over the outside case).

My first reaction, upon getting to where I was preparing to reinstall the cleaned up pan with its new gasket, was, gee whiz, that wasn't such a hard job after all! Now, a few days later, with the job still not complete, my reaction has been downgraded to "0/10, would not do job again even under pain of summary execution".

What changed? Well, when I was getting ready to put the pan back on, I'd planned to re-use the original pan bolts.

I noticed as I was taking them out that they had dried blue threadlocker all over them. Then I realized that the threaded bores in the transmission case were also full of dried blue threadlocker. And flakes of it were all over the gasket mounting surface. Gah.

I cleaned up the transmission case and then I put on a magnifier headset to examine the threads on the removed pan bolts. I've had to deal with cleaning off cured threadlocker before. Usually the blue stuff can be gently chased out of the threads; often just my thumbnail suffices to get that done.

In this case I immediately said, looking at them under magnification, "What the Sam Hill is wrong with these bolts?"

Many of them had visible deformation of the threads. Flattening and widening. As though they'd been overtorqued, or inserted off-axis and forced in anyway. A few were okay, but more than half showed these oddities.

When I removed the bolts, I did so using hand tools only. That damage wasn't on my watch.

Please note that according to the paper records available to me, which are pretty extensive, this vehicle has always been dealer serviced (save for a few oil changes at Sloppy Lube) and there are no work orders or receipts from the dealer for the transmission pan being dropped. Ever.

I concluded I didn't want to put those old bolts with janky threads back in for fear of messing up the threads in the bores in the trans case. Called the dealership, ordered 18 brand new bolts. Picked them up today. Got horribly overcharged (roughly double Toyota's list price). But at least their threads were impeccable.

Went home. Cleaned old blue threadlocker out of bores. New bolts come with preapplied blue stuff. Began to slowly and gently spin in bolts, one by one. No problem. I just took them down to where the captive washer first contacted the pan, then stopped, intending to go back once they were all in to that point, and start doing successive rounds of criss-cross tightening with an inch-pound torque wrench till spec was reached for all.

I then had my heart fall out of my chest on the 18th and last bolt. It went in cleanly, to within about 1mm of being snug to the pan, and then it started to just spin in the bore without tightening any further.

I gently reversed course and took the bolt back out. Inspected under magnification. Looked fine. I took out a previously installed bolt from elsewhere on the pan and tried it in that bore. Same dealio. Got close to snug, and then, a game of sit-and-spin.

Could this get worse? OH yeah. This is one of the four bolt bores which has a subframe structural member running directly underneath it. So drilling, and tapping, or helicoiling, if that turns out to be required, ain't gonna happen without a whole world of pain.

Hoping against hope I can stack another washer or two, or find a slightly shorter bolt, and still get this to torque down to an acceptable figure.

I'm completely buffaloed as to what could possibly have gone wrong here. Am I looking at old and bad assembly work by Aisin that is just now coming to light, 14 years later?

Or am I seeing a prior transmission internals service that was bungled, that isn't showing up in the paper trail?

Again, it can't be new disassembly damage, at least not by me: the bolt originally in that bore was taken out gently with hand power alone. Had to be! In the case of that specific bolt and bore, there is just no way to fit a power device into the tiny space available to work! I can't even fit fingers into the volume beneath the threaded bore.

I'm not sorry that the pan came off for cleaning and a new filter -- it needed those things, and it also needed a new pan gasket, because the old one had clearly visible edge cracks developing. What I am deeply rueful about is my decision to tackle this job myself instead of farming it out to a professional shop. Ouch.

 

Coast: thanks for the follow up and sorry to hear about the disaster with the pan bolts. My take on it...It was the dealer. Probably the first transmission service performed while still under warranty. (I noticed from service records they had serviced the transmission on my HL at about 30k miles.)
Anyway my dealer employs some real monkeys. Ham-fisted A-holes. They buggered up the drain port on my oil pan THREE different times.
I finally went with the ECO Plug magnetically held oil plug. They can strip the threads no more. ECO Plug has none!.
Good luck, Haya....

BTW- I posted my experiences on the ECO Plug:

Eco-Plug trial...why didn't I think of this!

Eco-Plug trial...why didn't I think of this! With Updates. 2003 V6 AWD 305k miles. The local Toyota dealer screwed up three times now with our oil changes. (We get $11 oil changes for life.) August 2015. Stripped pan threads-result replaced pan. April 2017. Stripped plug-result replaced plug...

www.toyotanation.com

 

Haya, you say that your dealer serviced the transmission at 30K?

Same here! Precisely! Even though the only thing per Toyota that's supposed to be done to the transmission at 30K is to inspect the fluid level and respond to irregularities therein.

Did you ever get an explanation as to why they'd done so for your vehicle?

The weird thing here is that... there's no actual work order in the dealer paperwork for the 30K visit. All there is is a bill of materials. Normally there are both documents present.

That bill of materials says at the very top, "30K service per menu". It's sure not TOYOTA's menu!

The dealer stuck in the usual array of little bill padding items like "oil conditioner" for the brand new fresh oil that they would've just put in. None of that stuff is in the factory service schedule, of course.

But also on the bill of materials are a couple of quarts of T-IV fluid, and a new transmission drain pan "gasket", a.k.a. washer, identifiable by part numbers.

I assumed from this -- perhaps incorrectly -- that all they must have done at 30K was to do a partial drain and refill. As to why? Impossible to determine. I asked the family member who owned the Highlander at the time if she recalled any complaint or difficulty regarding the transmission. Or if the service advisor had mentioned a recall/TSB action to her. She remembers nothing.

But... if they DID take the transmission pan off... they would have wanted to drain the fluid first, so as not to spill it everywhere, and they would have had to replace the drain washer. For which there are line items on the bill of materials. Whereas there aren't line items for a new pan gasket, nor for fresh bolts, but... if the service tech had simply re-used those items after a pan drop, they wouldn't appear.

Anyway, still dealing with an immobilized vehicle. The pan is finally back on but I'm not sure the damaged bolt bores will hold it securely. Ultimately this looks like a helicoil job at a professional shop. I called my nearest one of good repute. Owner said dubiously, uh, you're likely going to be looking at a subframe removal. So unhappy.

If I had this to do over again I'd have just put a Magnefine external filter on the return line from the trans cooler, and gone to an aggressive schedule of fluid changes, and left those transmission pan bolts entirely alone for as long as humanly possible.

 

Coast, quite some sleuthing on your part. And good point regarding the Magnafine filter. After reading about same and looking at a couple of U-tube videos, I actually put one (the 3/8" size) in my Cart on Amazon. On my next ATF drain and fill I'm gonna install it. Makes a world of sense. (I already have one on my power steering system).
The guy in the video comments that pulling the pan just riles up debris which can be harmful. You know, I have had the very same feeling about that. That is why I've never pulled the pan on my HL. Now after your (horror) story, never will I pull the pan!
Thanks for the feedback, I'll bet there are a lot of readers out here (like me) that appreciate your write-up. All the best, Haya....

 

The guy in the video comments that pulling the pan just riles up debris which can be harmful. You know, I have had the very same feeling about that. That is why I've never pulled the pan on my HL. Now after your (horror) story, never will I pull the pan!

Although as I noted in my first post, when the pan did come off, the pan gasket was visibly starting to lose it. I can't estimate how much longer it would have gone before it failed to the point of needing pan removal for gasket replacement, but the steady incremental process of failure had certainly begun.

I am having difficulty seeing how pulling the pan might get debris loose to cause harm, per the opinion in the video clip. The pan's of course at the bottom of the unit. Gravity still does its thing even on small particles in a viscous fluid. They settle out when the fluid's not disturbed. When the pan came free on this trans -- beware spillage while shuttling the removed pan out from under the vehicle -- the visible interior of the trans case above the pan looked pretty clean.

All the sediment and wear metals and polymerized ATF were in the pan, and all that got meticulously removed before reassembly, so none of it would possibly be being able to cause any trouble once the pan went back on.

Which the pan finally did do after heroic exertions. The thing which worked was a heavy wrap of Teflon tape, applied in the correct winding direction, to pad out the new replacement bolt in the partially stripped/crossthreaded/whatever bolt bore in the case. That and stacking a couple of washers provided enough clamping force at that point to let the pan gasket seal adequately.

At some point in the future, though, this might end up being a full scale Helicoil/Time-sert repair, and if so, it's going to cost a pretty penny. I urge everyone to exercise great caution when dealing with pan bolts. Work very slowly and with maximal precision; don't be afraid to stop and doublecheck.

I will follow up if I am able to get hold of any dealer service records which would confirm a prior removal of the pan by their techs. Those bolts I removed looked really quite bad. It strains credulity that bolts installed at a Japanese OE factory would look that way after having been removed just once, and that with great gentleness of effort.

 

helicoils are actually pretty easy to install, just drill the hole with the correct bit, tap the new threads and install the helicoil with the little tool that comes with them. You could probably just skip the ones under the subframe if you can get them to bite at all.
You could even think about drilling one hole at a time with the pan still on if you use washers when installing the bolts...