Date:         Sun, 25 Jun 2006 18:42:29 -0400
Reply-To:     s kraning <CaratTop90@CHARTER.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         s kraning <CaratTop90@CHARTER.NET>
Subject:      Transmission suddenly slipping
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

I have a 90 Carat with about 120K miles, the tranny was rebuilt about 10K miles ago. I had to return it to the shop about 5 times because they could never seem to get the mysterious cold morning Reverse gear problem ironed out. It would usually not drop right into gear after sitting for a while or on a cold morning. I finally figured out that if I let it warm up for a minute, or shift into a forward drive gear first, it would usually go right into Rev. The mechanic mentioned something about Vanagons draining fluid out of the gearbox that causes this, but my other automatics have been fine.
This shop returned the bus to me with an excess of about 2 quarts of tranny fluid for some reason. I always thought it was weird that the fluid level was about an inch and a half above the top mark on the dipstick. So I have been driving it around like that all this time and finally I decided to see if that was part of the reverse problem. Hopefully it has not damaged the gears - I've heard that this is not good for alot of gearboxes. 
So dropped about 2 quarts of fluid to get it to the middle of the marks (when cold.) Then I added a bottle of that Bars Leak Transmission Fix (2 chambers/ 1 bottle) to see if that would help anything. 

Anyway - I get out of my driveway, and immediately the gears are slipping all over the place, like never before. I turned around right away, but I'm hoping I haven't damaged anything permanently. Wondering if the cause of this is 1.) the Bars Leak stuff, or 2.) That the tranny fluid level is actually now much lower than it is supposed to be,and it was fine before i drained some out. Or - I'm missing something here. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

thanks,

scott k.