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Jackstands and Manual Transmission Fluid Changes First, a little story about Jackstands: Once upon a time, when I was back in high school, I new this gal. She was cute and happy and all, as high school girls tend to be. She was a friend of mine, but not a Top Five friend. Well, anyway, one day her dad is working on his car. He just jacked it up, and since he wasn�t going to really be working on it for long, he didn�t get out the jackstands. It crushed him to death when the jack let the car down on his chest. So use your jackstands. How To Change Your Manual Transmission Fluid 1. Buy some stuff to put in there. Redline MTF is considered to be the best ever created. It�s about $9 a quart and not terribly hard to find. If your Pepboys or Autozone doesn�t have it (mine doesn�t) then try the local dragster shops. Check a Chilton or Haynes manual to see how much you need to buy. Also, pick up a siphon pump. If you�re buying MTF and you ask for a siphon pump, they�ll know exactly what you want. 2. Jack up the front of the car. Support with Jackstands. Since you�re actually going to be significantly under the car, push on the car to make sure it�s very secure. Neighbors will think you�re crazy pushing on a car that�s jacked up, but better to fall without your head down there. (Don�t let people push on it when you�re down there, BTW.) 3. There are two drain plugs on the manual transmission. The top one is called the Fill hole (at least by me) and the bottom one is the Drain hole. Open the fill hole first. Why? Because if you can�t get it open and you drain everything out, you�re in trouble, buddy. 4. Now, open the drain plug. Oh, and you may have wanted to buy some tub or something to catch all that crap when you were at the store. This stuff will probably stink badly, in fact the new stuff will probably smell horrible also. 5. On my car, I have a limited slip differential. I know nothing about any other kind and don�t know if this is true for other types. It�s set up the same exact way, but rather than using MTF it uses 75w90. Again, I suggest synthetic, and Mobil 1 makes a great 75w90 gear oil. (I guess you�d have to jack up the back too if doing this.) 6. Ok, back to the tranny. After draining, put the drain plug back in and then use your lil pump to pump MTF into the tranny through the fill hole. How do you know you have enough in? Is it spilling out yet? When it is, that�s enough. 7. Put the fill plug back in. There is also what is called Turret oil also that can be changed at the same time. For that, and a slightly more visual tutorial on this current topic, I�ll direct you to a Miata guy who has a great little technical site, Hakuna Miata. http://www.miata.net/hakuna/oilmaintenance.html
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