Dirty fluid, trucks

I am very good about changing the oil in my vehicles. It’s always done every 3-4000 miles. I used to do it myself when money was tighter. However once I became more enviromentally conscious I started feeling bad about dumping the oil back behind the shed so I began having quick lube places do it. The last time I took my truck to the quick lube they showed me my transmission fluid. It was muddy in color. Trans fluid is usually reddish in color. Yuck. The truck has almost 60k on it and I never had the trans fluid touched. Well I plan to drive this truck into the ground so I want to keep things running well for as long as possible. So I went back yesterday to have them “flush” the trans.

The quick lube place makes me a bit nervous. Each time I go there it seems like nearly their entire workforce has turned over. I was greeted by a young guy with gold capped teeth. He actually was there 2 weeks ago so he must be one of the veterans. I told him I wanted the trans flushed. So the crew went into action and I could immediately tell then never flushed a toyota trans before. They struggled getting the skid plates off and fumbled around for awhile until they were actually ready to begin the flush. The flush machine has a little window where you can see the fluid through. When the flush started, the window was basically black. After about 15 minutes of flushing with fresh fluid, the window turned to a nice bright red. However after the flush, the boys were busy tag teaming an oil change on a full size dump truck in the next bay. As I was waiting, I was talking to the truck driver and got some interesting facts from him.

An oil change on the dump truck takes 40 quarts of oil, the oil gets changed every 10,000 miles and it costs about 300 dollars per change.

The truck is going to need a new set of back tires, they will cost approximately 2400 to replace. The front tires run 800 a pair.

He said the reason there are so many dump trucks lined up in the road on my commute is the ordinance that won’t allow the trucks onto the road until 7 am. After that they all pour out at once and create the mess. (made mental note to make sure I am out the door by 6:50 am every work day)

So anyway, eventually one of the service guys remembered I was standing there and came back over to disconnect the machine and put stuff back together. I drove off, content to finally address a service need of the truck that I had put off forever.

Yep I blogged about my trans flush, noone said blog entries had to be good.