How is your day going? To be honest, I'm having a great one—especially when you compare it to the day I had just a few weeks ago. It all started when I slipped on the stairs at my house after getting up early on a Saturday morning. I had snuck out of bed that morning to get a head start on my to-do list and a tumble down the stairs was my reward for not just sleeping in. Because I had a lot to do, I popped a "few" pain pills and went out to my truck to get started. This is when I noticed a nice leak coming from my transmission pan.
Determined not to let it ruin my day, I decided to take the positive attitude and just be glad I caught this when I did. Earlier in the month I had ordered a MAG-HYTEC deeper transmission pan that I had been meaning to get around to installing but hadn’t yet. I now had the motivation I had been lacking to get it installed and that motivation was in the form of a puddle of tranny fluid under my truck.
The nice thing about MAG-HYTEC products is I’ve never had any issues with them. The install was easy and the deeper pan even included a filter, which came standard when I ordered it directly from MAG-HYTEC. It now holds 7.6 quarts more fluid than my stock pan and included was the bolt kit and drain plug.
I was feeling really good about things since I even had some AMSOIL transmission fluid left over from another build and figured my Saturday and to-do list were still salvageable.
As I was finishing up with the install of the deeper tranny pan and doing a quick once-over since I’m not always good about really looking at the undercarriage on a regular basis, I realized I had another problem.
My front driveline had a little play to it and after a closer inspection it was clear that it would need to be rebuilt. I took it off and headed to a local shop who said they could fix it—at a decent price I suppose—but I wouldn’t be getting it back until earlier that next week so my day of chores was officially over.
To be honest, at this point I was a little frustrated since I did have a lot that I wanted to get accomplished that day using my truck and it was clear that wasn’t going to happen now. I figured I was just having a bad day, but my perspective changed when I went back for my rebuilt front driveline that next week.
What I had originally perceived as a bad day that started with a fall down the stairs to wake me up followed by a random tranny pan leak, turned out to actually be a good thing. (Okay, maybe not the stairs, but the leak was actually good). Had my stock tranny pan not started leaking that morning I never would have crawled under my truck, which means I never would have noticed the driveline.
I’m not sure how long I would have gone before I started noticing the slight vibration or other signs of failure, which means my bill could have been a lot higher had I not caught it when I did. Not to mention the following weekend I loaded up the family and headed to Montana for an impromptu camping trip, which would most likely have ended with an expensive tow had I not repaired the driveline prior to the trip.
So yes, while that Saturday wasn’t an ideal day and it surely wasn’t how I had originally planned it, looking back now I can appreciate that it wasn’t the bad day I had first thought it was. Plus, with the truck temporarily out of service, I had no choice but to push my to-do list off to another day and spend the rest of that Saturday with my kids. Turns out it was actually a great day after all.