When you have the tranny dipstick out, get a piece of stout leather
shoelace and tie about a 3" loop around the dipstick handle. The next
time you have to check the oil, just fish out the shoelace and use it to
pull the dipstick out.
A word of warning here - One of the big suppliers of gear oils in the US
(Sta-Lube) makes a plastic plunger pump that screws into their oil
bottles and allows you to pump in the gear oil through a plastic tube.
The newest design of this pump has a black plastic fitting on the end of
the tube that is designed with two little plastic fingers that clip into
the gearbox or diff. filler hole. This is supposed to keep the pump
tube from flopping out of the hole and covering you with gear oil and
making you smell like a dead dinosaur (a less than desirable state of
affairs).
Well here's the situation. I tried to use one of these pumps to fill
the gearbox on my MGA a few years ago. The fingers on the fitting were
too long to allow the end of the tube to fit into the gearbox hole, so I
trimmed them down to about half their original length. When I shoved
the tube into the gearbox (down through the tunnel hole under the dash)
I heard a suspicious little click. Yes, I had managed to trim the
fitting just small enough to go into the hole, but not to come back out!
No combination of coathangers, longnose pliers, or other implements
allowed me to get the fitting back out! I had three choices - remove
the engine and gearbox (hard), remove the floorboards and tranny tunnel
(easier, but tedious), or leave the fitting in the gearbox. I elected
for choice number three, surmising that the soft plastic would cause
little harm to the gearbox. I pulled out the filler tube, leaving the
plastic fitting in the tranny.
Well, I was lucky. A few hundred miles later, I elected to do an engine
rebuild. When I pulled the tranny apart to inspect it, I found black
plastic impacted inside the oil passages in the mainshaft! A little
more time and the tranny would have been history.
So if anyone has one of those new Sta-Lube pumps, pull off that black
plastic monstrosity and THROW IT AWAY!
Cheers,
Paul Kile
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