SCRIPTaR

My Taurus has been running fine until about a month ago. I had to replace the power steering rack (cost me $550. Did i pay too much? the mechanic said it will take him at least 5 hours to fix it!) Then a few days later I see oil leaking from the central, front end of ther car. It has been 6 days now and its still leaking. But more importanly, the transmission also felt different after i got it fixed. Now it slips violently. i was on a slope yesterday and the car went backwards because it was on neutral(Although it was on "D") then it abruptly "peels out."

Now my car obviosly need to get repaired. But my questions is: did the mechanic rip me off? Is it just a coincidence that the transmission screwed up after getting the steering fixed? How uch would this transmission repar cost? (local mechanic and official Ford mechanic)

The car has 63, 000 miles.

Sorry for the barrage of questions. Thanks.

SCRIPTaR

sorry for the typos and grammatical errors

spitzer

Take it to Ford let them know what happend. See what they think it is. I think that the SE has the AX4N tranny. Taurse trannys are not mad of old soviat tank parts so they do fail. Depending on what was moved when the mechanic had your car. It coud be his fault. My '97 LX has 92,000 on the tranny with a modded duratec and i have never had a problem with it. See if the fluid that is leaking is engine oil or tranny fluid. Either way if it was not leaking before he got in there, there is a good chance the machanic is the cause. To repair that from Ford you might as well bend over and take a good one. You can get a small tranmission shop to do the job. for alot less the ford. they can even put in slightly used trannys too. My brother has a modded SHO and had his tranny rebuilt at 120,000 miles from used parts. Cost was about 300. A new tranny about 1,200. It's up to you.

LunaticSVT

Cost is all relative. If he replaced the rack then it should be about that if not more. If he did a patch job then it should be less.

As far as the leak you are having. Have you looked under the car to see where it is running off of at? if it is a substantial leak then you should be seeing the run off on the parts underneath. With what you said regarding the tranny, I would think it would be tranny fluid that you are seeing. The slipping would be caused by the lack of fluid in there. Of course running it like this will only cause you more damage.

Costs. As spitzer has said. It can be anywhere from 300 - 1200. Just depends on the shop, parts used and prices in your area.

diofan

The Slipping could also be cause by the Transmission Range Sensor (Also known as a neutral Safety Switch) going bad! We can all hope this is the problem as the replacement part is less then 30 bucks and can be done in ten minutes if you are somewhat mechanically inclined. Both Vulcans and Duratecs usually have the oil pan slightly in front of the transmission pan. Lift the car and put it on jackstands, look under the car and see if you can locate the leak source. If it's a transmission leak, that's the cause of your Slippage, Otherwise, look at the TRS.

jwko

I would check the transmission lines and make sure they are tight and have no splits, kinks or rip's ect..

mpeoples

This tranny has some known issues (one which may be shared with the AX4S). The forward clutch gets burned out for two reasons that I've seen.

In an AX4S that I rebuilt, the wave spring in the forward clutch breaks, which means the clutch plates don't contact fully, resulting in them slipping against each other, resulting in eventual failure.

In an AX4N that I am rebuilding, the retaining clip on the forward control valve breaks, resulting in the valve jamming, as well as putting some nasty metal parts into the fluid. The same thing appears to happen to the forward clutch plates, though the root cause is different. Sonnax part number 96206-07K is supposed to fix this.

The relationship between these two conditions and the replacement of the steering rack is something I can't establish.

Both con