A vehicle’s transmission box is arguably just as complicated as any performance engine. Exactingly engineered gears are meshing and switching in the housing, “shifting” to ensure optimized power is delivered to the wheels of the vehicle. Bathed in grease and transmission fluids, this is a sealed unit, one that doesn’t require the same amount of maintenance as your engine, but that doesn’t mean it can be ignored. In fact, vehicle transmission maintenance and repair is viewed by technicians as a neglected discipline, with vehicle owners limiting their checks to the dipstick. Let’s change that disturbing trend by taking maintenance practices beyond the transmission fluid dipstick.
If you’re operating a car equipped with manual transmission, you’ll know the difficulties that come with city driving. Congested freeways have you dropping continually the clutch as you crawl the highways behind delayed vehicles. Red lights on a metropolitan avenue cause you to drop through your gears, and the clutch is generating wear. Unless you enjoy full transmission rebuilds, vehicle transmission maintenance and repair is an essential aid here, a means of avoiding nasty slippage events. On top of all this, if your vehicle sports an automatic transmission, then repair costs are going to climb drastically, so consult a transmission expert when strange noises occur during gear shifts. The same advice applies to slipping gears and shifting problems.
Performance refinements are lost when transmission problems sabotage engine power. Fuel economy is compromised and there’s a sense of lost power. Of course, without a professionally conducted gearbox assessment, one that looks inside the transmission housing, there’s no way to really know what’s going on. Remember, complex mechanical relationships define every part of the powertrain as it moves through the gearbox, whether the parts are ruled by a manually operated “stick” or an automated mechanism. And, in order for these gears to lock and mesh, every single component must operate at peak efficiency, meaning worn gears, misaligned drive shafts, and contaminated fluids must be maintained, replaced and repaired.
All-in-all, gears are defined by harmoniously operating helically toothed wheels and radially mounted spur gears fixed to a number of compact drive shafts. Everything meshes perfectly, all thanks to the transmission fluid, but a vehicle transmission maintenance and repair plan keeps this optimised train of rotating parts operating properly. The vehicle responds instantaneously to a manual shift and smoothly to an automatic change, proving the need for a parts repair or a fluid replacement strategy.
