I wanted to add a way to monitor transmission temps on my minivan without spending a lot of cash. Is there any reason I couldn't use an additional engine coolant temp gauge and sender plumbed into the external cooling lines? I don't need it to be super accurate, but this would let me know if I'm running hotter than whatever my baseline is.
most modern trans have one built in to tell the compter how to shift. Many guys tap in to it or just use scan-tronII
Why?
Are you towing a house around? If you change the fluid and filter, put in some good Lucas stuff you should be fine for everything the MiniVan was meant to do. If you're doing silly stuff a gauge won't stop catostrophic failure.
Dan
A poster do silly things, on this message board? No, surely you gest.
Why that would be like, oh, I dunno, building a car from junk, towing it hundreds of miles to drive around orange cones
OTOH, Agree. And the Lucas stuff is pretty good.
The difference between an engine oil temp gauge and a trans temp gauge and a coolant temp gauge is the oil ones usually go a little higher.
I use a coolant temp gauge for my oil, because the other difference is oil temp gauges are usually twice as much as coolant. It only reads to 250, but I don't ever want to see it get that hot anyway...
Be cheap like me: Put a 3/8" NPT bung in the pan and use a mechanical gauge. Do it right and you also have a convenient drain plug.
If you want your transmission to last, you need to keep the fluid cool. So yeah a gauge is a good idea just so you will know. Idiot lights are just that: idiot lights. I'd go with the 'bung in the pan' idea (braze it in place, much easier than welding thin sheet) and run an electric gauge, that's much easier to plumb than trying to put an adapter in line. Throw a big external cooler on there also and you are set.
Thanks for the replies.
It's a 92 Plymouth Voyager, and I've put almost 70k miles on it this year. I do a lot of driving up and down mountains sometimes carrying pretty heavy loads (for a minivan), so I would use a trans temp gauge mostly to tell me if I need to back off the throttle or pull over and rest for a bit. I'm also thinking that if I am very lucky it could alert me to a fluid loss by a spike in temperature before too much damage could be done to the trans.
I did put a fresh looking transmission in this summer out of a cash for clunkers victim, it still had stickers on it from the rebuild.
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