charleswrivers
Senior Member
- First Name
- Charles
- Joined
- Nov 3, 2017
- Threads
- 43
- Messages
- 3,736
- Reaction score
- 4,468
- Location
- Kingsland, GA
- Vehicle(s)
- '14 Odyssey, '94 300zx, 2001 F-150
- Vehicle Showcase
- 1
That's a fine stance to take, and I'd probably err on the side of Honda MTF or an equivalent that could easily be bought in a brick and mortar store... but I can't argue with tangible results of different "boutique" fluids.I only use Honda MTF. I trust the engineers who built the engine has chosen it for good reason. After all, Hondas are known for reliability for a reason and their engineers are why.
Honda actually has a less than stellar track record with their automatic and manual transmissions. There's TSBs all over the place for Honda and Acura. I've had one accomplished on the 6-speed auto in my '14 Odyssey. There's piles of doom and gloom back on their older 4 and 5 speed autos. For those of us in the RSX crowd, by the time they came out with TSBs for a "real" fix for our 6 speed manuals... our cars were already past the warranty extension period, despite it being acknowledged the issue was for all Type-Ss. So... rather than go out-of-pocket, I tried 2 or 3 different MTFs other than Honda. One was worse, to be honest... and pretty much prevented shifting when the car was cold in the winter-months in NY State. Amosil was the best and effectively cured. If you goodle "acura 3rd gear popout", you'll get a ba-zillion hits... can't remember the TSB # but it came out in '08 I think... well after production had wrapped. There was a sister TSB that came out covering the Hondas that had the same issues. Use of a different fluid was a consistent, low cost option to allow the cars to have good operation of their transmissions through the life their owners had them w/o paying to have the transmission rebuilt. I'd call that a win.
"Infamous 2nd gear crunch" is one of the largest threads on our site for the CTR section with nearly 1500 postings... and the non-CTR folks definitely have our fair share of threads/postings for ours too.
l've really enjoyed my Hondas/Acuras… and think they have a fun to operate transmission... but they're far from perfect. If memory serves, I had my RSX for 3 years and put 40-50k miles in it... and started the search for a better MTF at the mid-way point of mileage because I was a bit frustrated with how notchy it was and how I'd pop-out of 3rd gear when pushing the car. (shrug) It was a cheap experiment that worked (once I found a MTF the transmission took to) and make the transmission operate smoothly w/o 3rd gear popout the last year or two I had it for the $30 or so it cost for the fluid.
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