any point to this?

http://shop.advanceautoparts.com/web...aGPPAodyEEASQ#

 

For auto yes. Manual hardly so.

ATF works as lubricant and also used to transfer power. Thus most modern vehicles have tranny cooler to extend the service life of oil and tranny.

If you like having gauges go for it! You may be able to catch catastrophic melt down in the process.

IMO not worth the headache.

 

For an automatic if you're towing in the heat, but for an everyday driver the way most of us use our Minis I'd say no. For a manual transmission it'd be bling and not much use.

 

I'm a sucker for instrumentation, but there really isn't anything on a manual transmission to go wrong from a cooling stand point, so hard to see much point. It might alert you to a leak if the probe was in the right place, but hard to say. And since a manual doesn't really have an "oil pan" per se, so I'm not even sure it is technically feasible (enough room) to plumb a probe into the body of the tranny. And you'd have to remove the transmission from the vehicle. Finally, this would create a potential leak point. A ton of work for dubious benefit.

Critical transmission assemblies on heavy machinery and aircraft (particularly helicopters) sometimes have chip detectors to detect excessive wear when it can be caught early on, but this sort of thing is in a whole different league with respect to engineering and cost. Pretty silly to have a $2K chip detector to detect early wear in a transmission that costs $1500 to replace.

- Mark