Ted, ATF is nothing more than a very high detergent mineral oil. If you are following a good maintenance schedule with your oil changes, it's likely a waste of ATF. Back in the day, we would always run Type-F fluid in the A/ED trans as it picked up the friction coefficient numbers. Which tells me
that may not have been real good stuff in the oil pan.
This was a good place to be, if you were running an automatic in a drag car, as Steve Griner Engineering is owned and operated by a hometown boy. When we first built the car, we figured a T-400 was the way to go.
Heck, we didn't know any better. (OK, how many of you have built a record-holding Comp Eliminator dragster in a one car garage? And I do mean 'built', as in chassis and all!) And 3-4 years before anyone even knew what they were, we had an internal trans-brake on that car. The people that paid attention were always driving themselves berserk, trying to figure out how we could stall the car like that, yet there was no external drum on the output shaft. :wolf: We had a delay box on the car prior to anyone marketing commercial boxes (yeah,
we should have marketed them!). When most people were still trying to understand what an MSD box was, we were running an LED/photo-transistor crank trigger with a home-brew multi-firing capacitive discharge box. That car was about 10 years ahead of its time and we were too stupid to realize it. Ahhhh, but I digress...
For those that are considering the use of ATF to clean a poorly-maintained engine, remember you stand the chance of a lot of 'things' and 'stuff' blocking the oil pump pick-up screen and/or making its way into the pump body. How many barber-pole Ford oil pump drives have you seen in
your day? :winkn:
For those wondering about what brand ATF to use in a trans, the answer is the cheapest stuff you can buy. It will work as well as the high dollar stuff claims to work.
