well today i went with my friends for a cruise around the island and i noticed a couple of times when there was alot of load on the car like going up an incline for awhile it started smoking pretty bad. when we stopped i looked at the back of my car and it had all this oily spray on the back of my car and it smelt like burnt trans fluid. i think my trans is dying,has anyone else ever had this happen before?

 

If there is a leak it could be burning off on the exhaust. Doesn't mean it's dying.

 

Could also be power steering fluid, they use tranny fluid also.

 

yeah, i thought about the power steering after i posted this and thats prolly the problem since it has a leak somewhere.... well i'll try jack it up after class but if the trans is leaking is there any usual places to check for it?

 

What color is the smoke? Mine would emit white smoke while going uphill after it was overfilled with motor oil once. Oil can pass through a breather tube and into the combustion chamber. Check your motor oil level to make sure it's not too full.

 

I had the same symptoms and it was the rear main seal leaking. On inclines the oil dripped onto the exhaust, whereas on the flat it didn't.

 

What happens when an engine is overfilled with oil?

So you topped up the engine when it was warm after getting a faulty dipstick reading, or you put too much oil in when you changed it yourself. What's the worst that could happen? Well the problem with this is that the next time the engine is run, the windage in the crankcase and other pressures generated by the oil pump, etc. place a great strain on the seal on the rear main bearing.
Eventually, often much sooner than the ordinary man in the street might expect, the rear main bearing seal ruptures, and the engine becomes a 'leaker'. If you've got a manual gearbox, this means one thing: this oil goes right onto the flywheel and the face of the clutch disc. A lubricated clutch is A Bad Thing. If this still goes unnoticed, the front seal is the next to go, and the engine then becomes a 'gusher' (or to be more colourful, it starts pissing oil all over the place). As well as smothering the clutch with oil from the rear, the oil now coming from the front leak will be neatly distributed about the engine bay as it hits the front pulley - often propelling it out as far as the brake discs. At the same time as this Hollywood disaster movie is unfolding outside the engine, things aren't working out any better on the inside. As you can see from the diagram, the correct oil level is really close to the rotating crank. Overfilling will mean the crank dips into the oil and churns it into a froth. Froth is good on certain types of coffee but not good in an engine. The mixture of aerated oil will be forced into the bearings and in case you didn't know, air is not a lubricant. Typically this means that bearing damage will follow quite rapidly, especially if you are driving on a motorway. You'll know bearing damage when you get it. The engine smells like a garage mechanic cooking over an open flame and the noise coming from the engine is the sort of thing you'd normally hear in vaudeville plays when a piano is pushed down a flight of stairs. As if that all wasn't bad enough, the excess oil gets thrown up into the piston bores where the piston rings have a hard time coping with the excess oil and pressure. It gets into the combustion chamber and some of it will get out into the exhaust system unburned resulting in a nice patina of oil all over the platinum surfaces of your catalytic converter. This renders it utterly useless for good.