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So this is more of an opinion question then fact but which is the best way to let your tranny cool down??
What I'm saying is if your on a long hill and your trans. temp is creeping up and there's that moment you have of "ok time to pull over or do I push the next 50 yards and then it's downhill from there". Do you pull over with an almost too hot tranny, put it in neutral and cool down while parked or is it better you push the next little bit and let gravity take over??
Depends on the trans temp. You do have a digital tranny temp gauge with the sender in the sump, right? Or the sender somewhere in the tranny that will give you sump temp.
In that case, 225° sump temp is the normal red line, but if you're only 50 yards from the top off the pass, then downshift one gear and keep on keeping on until you top out and head down the other side of the pass. Don't allow more than about 240° before you pull over and stop, even if you're only 50 yards from the top, then put the tranny in park, and engine RPM held at around 1,300 RPM until the sump temp falls below 225°.
Idiot gauges are almost useless. On an F-150 if the tranny temp idiot gauge on the dash shows white zone, you're good to go. But the instant it jumps into the yellow zone your tranny is too hot. If it jumps into the red zone, your tranny is probably already toast. So if you are trying to tow in mountains, then ask you passenger to concentrate on the gauge and holler the instant it jumps into the yellow zone. Then find a place to safely pull over and park, shift into park, and elevate the engine RPM to about 1,300. Sit there twiddling your thumbs until the gauge drops back into the "normal" zone.
If your tranny overheats, even on mountain passes, then your trailer is probably too heavy for your F-150. One patch would be to replace the stock oil-to-air (OTA) tranny cooler with a bigger unit. If your F-150 doesn't even have an OTA cooler, then you don't have the trailer towing package and shouldn't be trying to tow more than a rowboat over the pass.
Last edited by smokeywren; 07-17-2017 at 07:14 PM.
If you have the OTA cooler and your overheating, it's time to either give the thing a good scrubbing or tow in a lower gear (for more fluid flow), or both.
1. Make sure that you have adequate truck for the trailer.
2 Drive conservatively.
3. Install a digital gauge if you don't have one and watch it.
4. Don't get in the situation where you have to make the decision to push in with a hot tranny or not.
Every time the torque convertor unlocks and pushes fluid to drive instead of the engine doing it, trans temps will rise. Downshifting to a lower gear *may* lock up the TC and help with dropping the temps. Ran into this on my 14, what I thought was the trans cooler, was for something else, as I found the coolant lines ran to the radiator and not the cooler in front of everything. Locking out 5th forced it to stay in 4th and that helped a lot on the return trip.
Ran into this on my 14, what I thought was the trans cooler, was for something else, as I found the coolant lines ran to the radiator and not the cooler in front of everything.
Look again. With the trailer tow pkg, both hot ATF and return lines come out of the tranny and connect to the back of the radiator. Actually, the hot line goes to the radiator, and the return line goes from the radiator to the back of the tranny.
Inside the radiator, the hot line goes through the oil-to-water (OTW) cooler then out the front of the radiator and into the oil-to-air (OTA) cooler. When it comes out of the OTA cooler it is now the return line. The return line comes out of the OTA cooler, then goes through the radiator (without doing anything inside the radiator) and then back to the rear of the tranny.
There's a lot of stuff around the radiator. With an EcoBoost engine, there's not only the OTA tranny cooler, but also a big charge air cooler (so-called intercooler) to help cool down the super-heated air coming out of the turbo.
Look hard and you can see the hot ATF line coming out of the bottom front of the radiator and connecting to the OTA tranny cooler.
Well I would if the truck were still around, but last I saw of it, there wasn't much left of the front end. The small cooler on the front didn't connect to the radiator, they ran around it. Not sure what it was, but my 14 did not have a tow package.
From what I see in this picture, this is the cooler, but that's not what was in my old truck, it was half that size.
Well I would if the truck were still around, but last I saw of it, there wasn't much left of the front end. The small cooler on the front didn't connect to the radiator, they ran around it. Not sure what it was, but my 14 did not have a tow package.
From what I see in this picture, this is the cooler, but that's not what was in my old truck, it was half that size.
That small cooler receives trans fluid from drivers side of the radiator, then goes straight back to the transmission. Mine does not pass through the radiator again. It passes underneath the radiator where it meets up with the sending line and they run parallel all the way back to the trans. So basically it first passes through the rad to get pre-cooled, then through the OTA to final cool, then goes back. I believe this specific picture is of the max-tow setup.
This doesnt make a whole lot of sense to me, because if you are pulling a big hill then chances are your engine coolant is getting hot too, not sure how much heat its going to extract from the ATF at the radiator. I think someone said the coolant temp gauge doesnt start to move until 232F so you could theoretically have the engine coolant at 230F and be trying to "cool" 220F trans fluid and not even know the truck is running hot. I know the Chevy Trailblazer SS had a similar setup(without the secondary OTA cooler) so a lot of guys were completely bypassing the radiator part and sending the ATF to a standalone cooler mounted behind the "brakeduct" on the lower bumper.
This doesnt make a whole lot of sense to me, because if you are pulling a big hill then chances are your engine coolant is getting hot too, not sure how much heat its going to extract from the ATF at the radiator.
I would assume the reason why they designed it that way is to get the trans fluid up to operating temps faster.
07-17-2017, 04:25 PM
How to let your Transmissin cool??
