On his way to work this customers Toyota Hilux Surf started to overheat so he pulled over to check his coolant to find it had all gone.

He topped up the coolant but as soon as he started the car it disappeared and when he looked underneath there was a puddle of pink creamy liquid coming from half way down the vehicle.

He had it recovered to the garage and it was our challenge to find out what had gone wrong.

First we removed all the under trays and found the pink creamy liquid was coming from the top automatic gearbox breather!

We drained the gearbox to find it was full of gearbox/coolant mix indicating a major failure in the gearbox cooling system.

The next port of call was to check the gearbox oil cooler which is situated in the bottom of the radiator and straight away we found that this was the cause of the problems.

As the vehicle was a import the customer was able to source a radiator cheaper than the main
dealer, the next day it arrived and we fitted it as required, next was the clean out operation of the cooling system and gearbox which we did with a coolant flush and gearbox flush.

The customer was informed that as we couldn’t get all the oil and coolant out of the cooling system and gearbox he would have to return the car for future flushes.

Once all of the work was completed we needed to test drive the car to make sure it selected all of its gears as it should and that there was no more mixing of the gear oil and coolant.