How To: Reduction Gear Oil Change

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powersurge said:
I use the Valvoline MaxLife ATF. It works on all cars, and with 5 cars, I really dont want to keep too many brands..

The important thing is to get the synthetic fluids..

Thanks. I will just run with MaxLife since that's what we keep around the place. Typically I add Archoil AR9100 to all gear boxes as well.
 
Hello,
This is my first post, so be patient :oops:
It took me about 7.5 hours to do the work, but I am not a car handyman by any means. - I have not read all of the posts in this thread, but I wanted to report a few experiences and lesson learned that I got while doing this work. I spent the longest time in getting to center the floor jack to right spot, that eventually I nailed by interpreting the Nissan's manual Lifting Point diagrams, and going out to buy the extra 2 jack stands (it seemed that the entire town population had decided to raid the local Canadian Tire on Sunday afternoon).

1) The idea of putting the floor jack under the driver side reinforced rim, while could still be viable to protect the car it's discouraged widely because you shouldn't be leaving the car standing on the floor jack which is normally not intended to bear the weigh of the car for a long time. For this reason, and because I still need to exist for my family, I opted for the 2 jack stands at the front.

2) As per 1) - putting the jack stands for safety makes the operation of lifting/lowering the car more laborious. Considering that you have to find the lifting point, that at first glance isn't that easy.

3) On just the front stands the car is obviously in a very slanted position, hence the Reduction Gear oil won't be sitting properly when you drain it and when you fill it. This means, it will not drain fully and it won't allow you to fill it all with the mechanism described in the first post, as when you raise the car again to close the filling plug, the oil will gush from that opening when your remove the feeding tube, until you close it, reducing the amount of liquid you eventually get back in. For this reason I went out and bought another pair of 3 ton jack stands, lifted the back to level the car and worked the entire operation at once with the car on the four stands. This way you only have to lift the car once and it may possible to do the entire thing without even removing the wheel. The 3 Ton Jack stand were on sale ... how lucky!.

4) The frontal lifting point is not under the front aerodynamic protection sheet.... it's visible as something that looks like (from the distance) a nut on a bolt .. but instead it's just a small soldered stud. - I will try to add some pictures to describe this better.

5) The back lifting point is a bit awkward as it is basically the lower leg of the U shaped metal bar that links the two posterior wheels (note here the lack of technical terms, typical of a person with no mechanical background!) -

I used a garage floor jack, and jack stands for the first time. For the first time I replaced a liquid on the underside of a car. For the first time I also laid down flat under a 2 ton car on four stands... which looked a bit flimsy while under there (!) :shock:

The car seems to be shifting more nicely now.. but that could just be a placebo effect due to not wanting to have all this time spent for nothing. (LOL). - Thank you again to the guy that posted the series of pictures on the first post here, it was an inspiration.

I'll try to learn how to post picture... as I need to post pictures.
 
cquarinto - good job getting this done for the first time! go to www.imgur.com to host the pictures and you can then copy the image link with square brackets around 'img' from there and paste in your post to put them here.

feel free to help document the proper jackpoints for others in the future :)

Marko
 
Oilpan4 said:
Tip for jacking the leaf: Don't.
Just use ramps.

Sure, if you're only doing this task and have four ramps. I was rotating tires at the same time, so stands were a requirement. I also found it faster to zip out the fill plug from the wheel well with a few extensions. (Guessing it was overtorqued from the factory based on effort needed to remove.) That's how I checked the fluid level the previous year, too.

I agree with your earlier post — this was the easiest gearbox oil change I've done.
 
Just finished mine this week using the info here, was very easy and straight forward. A lot easier than other vehicles I've had to change in the past (as noted by many others in this topic). I did notice the +0.3 efficiency improvement almost immediately. I do delivery routes in my Leaf and I driving the same routes (some of which are 25 miles long with no traffic, stop lights), I can always peg how much kilowatt/per mile that each route will get when resetting the dash meter every-time. I never get better numbers, always consistent unless the weather is really windy/cold/hot/etc. I had this entire week of great weather to test the usual routes and every single time, scored between +0.2 and +0.3 improvement on range. I can even see it in my guess-o-meter estimates at a full charge, I am scoring an extra 4 to 5 extra miles compared to before. So while not scientific of course, I can see some real-world results that others in this topic have also noticed. :mrgreen:
 
knightmb said:
Just finished mine this week using the info here, was very easy and straight forward. A lot easier than other vehicles I've had to change in the past (as noted by many others in this topic). I did notice the +0.3 efficiency improvement almost immediately. I do delivery routes in my Leaf and I driving the same routes (some of which are 25 miles long with no traffic, stop lights), I can always peg how much kilowatt/per mile that each route will get when resetting the dash meter every-time. I never get better numbers, always consistent unless the weather is really windy/cold/hot/etc. I had this entire week of great weather to test the usual routes and every single time, scored between +0.2 and +0.3 improvement on range. I can even see it in my guess-o-meter estimates at a full charge, I am scoring an extra 4 to 5 extra miles compared to before. So while not scientific of course, I can see some real-world results that others in this topic have also noticed. :mrgreen:

This result prompts me to ask, "What fluid did you use?" OEM? Aftermarket?

My plan is to use AMSOil ATF Fuel-Efficient. I'm assuming that it has a slightly lower viscosity than the regular ATF.
 
HRTKD said:
This result prompts me to ask, "What fluid did you use?" OEM? Aftermarket?

My plan is to use AMSOil ATF Fuel-Efficient. I'm assuming that it has a slightly lower viscosity than the regular ATF.

After reading over the whole topic, I couldn't find any of the ones mentioned here at the auto store(s), so I went with a *budget* Valvoline MaxLife™ Multi-Vehicle ATF, you can get the technical specs on it from this link:
https://www.valvoline.com/our-products/automatic-transmission-products/maxlife-multi-vehicle-atf

Also note, didn't change mine until 66K miles, so it's possible it didn't really gain efficiencty, but just returned to what it was new since the stuff was very dark and dirty when I changed it, plus a lot of the metal fragments seen in the pictures posted here when others changed their gear fluid.
 
knightmb said:
Also note, didn't change mine until 66K miles, so it's possible it didn't really gain efficiencty, but just returned to what it was new since the stuff was very dark and dirty when I changed it, plus a lot of the metal fragments seen in the pictures posted here when others changed their gear fluid.

ATF gets nasty looking when it's not in a transmission. There's no filter in the Leaf gearbox, just like a transfer case on a 4x4 has no filter. There's no cooling mechanism in a transfer case. So the fluid tends to get dark. Modern synthetic ATF is hardy stuff that can handle some fairly high temperatures. Like well above 250° F.

It would be interesting to have the used fluid tested to see how the viscosity compares to new fluid.
 
I'm about to go change another family member Leaf (2015) gear oil, I can save some from the change, they have 70K miles on their Leaf. I don't have the instruments to measure the viscosity unless someone has a "poor man's" way of doing the measurement? :mrgreen:
HRTKD said:
ATF gets nasty looking when it's not in a transmission. There's no filter in the Leaf gearbox, just like a transfer case on a 4x4 has no filter. There's no cooling mechanism in a transfer case. So the fluid tends to get dark. Modern synthetic ATF is hardy stuff that can handle some fairly high temperatures. Like well above 250° F.

It would be interesting to have the used fluid tested to see how the viscosity compares to new fluid.
 
knightmb said:
I'm about to go change another family member Leaf (2015) gear oil, I can save some from the change, they have 70K miles on their Leaf. I don't have the instruments to measure the viscosity unless someone has a "poor man's" way of doing the measurement? :mrgreen:

Blackstone Labs (https://www.blackstone-labs.com) does used oil analysis. They'll ship you a test kit (basically just a bottle for the sample and another container for shipping) for free.
 
HRTKD said:
knightmb said:
I'm about to go change another family member Leaf (2015) gear oil, I can save some from the change, they have 70K miles on their Leaf. I don't have the instruments to measure the viscosity unless someone has a "poor man's" way of doing the measurement? :mrgreen:

Blackstone Labs (https://www.blackstone-labs.com) does used oil analysis. They'll ship you a test kit (basically just a bottle for the sample and another container for shipping) for free.

Hmm, glad I saved a big sample. :mrgreen:

Edit, ordered (2) test kits because I have a family member I am about to help change next week, I'll collect their sample as well. :mrgreen:
 
I would be interested in seeing a Blackstone test on leaf oil on leaf oil with a crap ton of miles.
I should have done mine but just dumped it into the ICE used oil container.
Guess I could change it again and test it this time. Mien leaf has only had 1 oil change and that was about 16,000 miles ago.
 
Here is sample #1 from my Leaf (67K miles), and yes it did look that bad coming out :lol:

kltOhDB.jpg
 
Hey if still have that and you send some off for analysis to Blackstone labs and post the results I'll paypal you $20.
I changed mine for the first time at 68k and it looked like that.
When I did mine I dumped it in with the used ice oil and didn't even think about an oil sample till the moment it was all out of the car.
 
Oilpan4 said:
Hey if still have that and you send some off for analysis to Blackstone labs and post the results I'll paypal you $20.
I changed mine for the first time at 68k and it looked like that.
When I did mine I dumped it in with the used ice oil and didn't even think about an oil sample till the moment it was all out of the car.

I'm waiting for (2) test kits to come in I ordered, so yeah, I will be glad to take any donations to help pay for the $30 analysis fee. :mrgreen:
 
I'll cover $20.
Then I'll do mine at around 20,000 to 25,000 and see how it looks. Got almost 17,000 on there now. So it will probably be the middle of winter when I hit 20,000.
 
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