socal400

So about a month ago my starter literally blew up in front of my house. Being in school and very busy, I just took it to a shop to get it redone with my very leaky valve cover gaskets. My family has gone to this shop for longer than I've been alive so I thought it would be alright. I got a call confirming my suspicions of a previously intact starter no longer being intact and had them replace it. In that process my mechanic mentioned something about a piece falling in the transmission, but I assumed they removed it because why wouldn't they. Unfortunately since then I've developed a metal clinking sound on acceleration/deceleration and when I went to investigate it I found tinfoil/a loose bolt/paper under my intake manifold where they were working on the starter. This leads me to believe that, since they didn't clean up one mess, they didn't go the distance to remove the fallen piece into my transmission. That leads me to my question, where do I go from here? I've heard horror stories of draining and refilling the sc's transmission fluid but I also would like to not have metal bouncing around in one of the most important parts of my car. Even still, my fluid is pretty dark and should probably get taken care of eventually. I'm both broke and quite busy so this has turned into quite the annoyance. Any insight helps, thanks in advance. Maybe I'll just sell my kidney and save up for the manual swap. lol.

RudysSC

I'm hoping that they mean a piece fell into the bellhousing area near the torque converter, not actually inside of your transmission. Hopefully any debris got cleaned up and is out of the way of those moving parts. However, you'd have to puncture a hole in the transmission case itself to get anything stuck internally. Did the noise clear up after you removed the debris from under the intake manifold? If not, you may want to pull the lower inspection cover between the motor and the transmission to make sure nothing is stuck in the bellhousing area while the torque converter and flex plate spin... Otherwise, ya, the trans drain and fill is quite a process on those cars (there are several threads that show the process). However, in the long run, it's well worth keeping clean fluid in there as those transmissions will last forever as long as the fluid is freshened up from time to time.

Hope this helps at least a bit... Sorry for your poor experience. I work on my own car a lot and when I pay someone else to do it I always have high expectations (but not everyone can fulfill what they say they can do in a professional fashion unfortunately).

RXRodger

iTrader: (2)

I echo Rudy, I don’t think they would have dropped anything into the trans but more likely in the bellhousing area. If I didn’t find anything in that area after pulling the plate, I would send it.

hybridview

So they charged a fortune to fix a starter that was not broken, destroyed your engine ECU, and then had the gall to charge you a $1000 restocking fee for a transmission that you didn't need? You need to at least write a bad review to save others from these d-bags.

Tallyhoe

I'd pull the inspection cover just in case. I have an 02 Celica and wanted to go e153 transmission swap. Some customers were complaining about the adapter dropping dowels and in atleast 1 case, locked up the wheels. .. We're talking about fwd vs rwd.. Depending on the size of the dropped item it may cause serious issues.