Yaris RS, The First Fixes – Gearbox Service

Nothing stays untouched in my fleet for long, so the Yaris got some work done the day after picking it up.

The plan was to change the gearbox oil and see if it would help the noises the gearbox has been making.

As half my axle stands, and both my ramps, are still stuck under the Marina, I shuffled the Quickjacks out and under the car.

The joys of working on small cars, they leave heaps of space in the garage to get around.

The underside looks pretty tidy. There is a small oil leak down the back of the engine, but otherwise nothing to report. I did note that the oil filter housing wasn’t fully tightened (I serviced hundreds of Toyotas as a lube tech, so familiar with how it should look), but not leaking, so snugged that up. Kudos to the previous female owner for doing the last oil change herself, but the mechanic father that was watching over her shoulder should have picked that up.

Now, I have serviced dozens of gearboxes, including a wide range of Toyota boxes, but don’t recall having ever come across an EC67 gearbox, so had some trouble working out how to service it.

The drain plug was obvious, its the one on the bottom of the box

But the fill plug, which on most Toyota gearboxes is on the front LH side of the box, was nowhere to be found.

I did find a plug on the very LH end of the box, hard up against the covers, which to me looked like it was too low to fill the box with 2.3L of oil, but according to Haynes that might be the fill/level plug, so keep that in mind.

Before I found that, after much stumbling through Youtube on the world’s slowest computer, with all the videos showing the fill plug on the front, I finally found someone with the same EC6x gearbox.

Following his guide, I too decided to use the fill plug on the top of the gearbox, so out came the air filter housing

The fill plug is here, and it’s a 19mm head. An offset ring spanner is good for this job as there is limited space until you contact the battery tray above it.

With the fill plug removed, I drained the old fluid. It was as thin as water, jet black and stank. I drained 2.5L, which indicates the box was overfilled by 200ml. Thankfully no signs of metal, and no chunks.

Based on how tight and untouched the drain plug was, and how worn out the oil was, I suspect it was WAY overdue for a change, and likely contributed to the gearbox condition. The previous owner thought it might have been done when she got the car, but wasn’t sure. She had the car since 68,000km and now it’s on 213,000km…

New washers on the plugs, of course

Using my small “tom thumb” pump bottle I pumped exactly 2.3L of new fluid into the gearbox. Annoyingly the fill hole is too small for the hoses that come with the bags of Nulon fluid, and too close to the battery tray to use a funnel, but the pump bottle was a perfect fit.

Once the gearbox was all buttoned back up, I moved on to a couple of other jobs in the same vicinity. With the intake piping out I noticed the throttle body was quite dirty, so I gave that a quick clean.

I removed the MAF from the airbox as that needed a clean too

I gently cleaned it with contact cleaner and the corner of a rag and then refitted it to the airbox.

A sneaky, albeit dirty, K&N panel filter was found lurking in the airbox. I gave it a shake out and refitted, but it’d benefit from a proper clean and oil later.

These engines are pretty darn ugly without their beauty covers fitted. It’s like manufacturers are banking on chucking plastic over it and put no effort into making engines look good anymore

That was the extent of the servicing today. I had a quick look around and it’s very tidy underneath, with no real concerns. It’ll need new rear tyres, which I knew about, and the front pads are a bit low, so that’ll be a good excuse to get some fast road pads soon.

The previous owner changed the oil about 3000km so, so I’ll do it again in a couple of thousand KM, and she recently did the spark plugs, but they’re easy to get to so I might pop them out at some point and check them.

Driving the car to work the next day shows some improvement. The whine at 100kph was almost gone, but the 50kph whine was still there, maybe a little lessened. The slow synchro on 2nd when cold was still slow, but it’s fine when warm. No miracle fix, but I didn’t expect it to be, I just wanted to be sure it actually had oil in it.

Cleaning the MAF and throttle body did result in a smoother idle, and slightly better throttle response with less hang when coming off the throttle. I have a throttle controller on the way from Japan to see what difference it makes, as it was night and day on the Swift. We’ll see.