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I own a 1993 1.3 litre Ford Laser fitted with a manual transmission.

I've had the car for about 9 months and over that time have travelled approximately 20,000km. The odometer is currently reading 142,000km.

I'm not sure if the previous owners ever had the gearbox oil changed, so my question is: would you recommend that I have this done?

Robert

From the "Ask Jack" archives - 4 November 2010

To be honest, very few manual transmissions have their oil changed with cars of this age.

Oil in a basic manual gearbox is there to simply lubricate whereas the fluid in a automatic transmission is subjected to high temperatures/pressures and contributes greatly to the smoothness of the auto changes.

Automatics will also over time, suffer from oil contamination as a result of wear from the internal transmission friction material.

It definitely would not hurt to change the oil in your transmission as there will be contamination of some sort generated from general wear and tear.

Once changed, you could almost forget about it for the rest of the car's life (unless you experience a transmission problem).

The important thing is to ensure the correct grade of oil is used on the refill.