Hello 81 Toyo,
I haven't been on the forums in a while and looked into this just now. I did receive your private messages and am sorry for not replying to them. I just spoke to Christine and she sent your refund last week. I did not ask with the sales guys or the transmission department as to what took so long. As mentioned over the summer we only had 1 sales guy and had to trim back to 1 phone line, but we now have 2 sales guys and another part-time sales guy with 3 phone lines open, so please give us a call to discuss warranty info, if needed.
I'd like to address the issue you experienced. You
for sure should not have had
any leaks and definitely should not have had to fix it yourself. This is why we guarantee our transmissions for a generous unlimited mileage & 12 months. I see in your PM that you installed a paper gasket on the nose cone to address the leak.
We do not use paper gaskets for two reasons:
1) We blue print every transmission and depend on the minimal thickness of the genuine Toyota FIPG silicone we use to control the end-play of the input gear (to maximize the life of the input and input bearing). In fact on our Heavy Duty builds we machine the nose cones to preload the bearing making a thin silicone seal all that more important, and
2) Paper gaskets do a horrible job at sealing transmission housings and as a result beginning in 1988 Toyota stopped using them on all truck transmissions and upgraded to silicone instead. We follow suit by upgrading pre-1988 transmissions such as yours to this superior sealing method that Toyota uses on modern transmissions.
Both standard and HD builds are blueprinted and by switching to a paper gasket at the nose cone you have introduced end-play to the input gear as well as a paper seal that is less reliable than silicone. I cannot say that the paper gasket is detrimental in the immediate sense, and I don't want to scare you as after all the earlier transmissions did indeed use a paper gasket by default, but Marlin has invested an enormous amount of time into improving Toyota transmissions and my advice would be that someday down the road if you ever pull out the transmission for any reason you should remove that paper gasket and replace it with genuine Toyota silicone to ensure maximum life from your input gear and input bearing.
I am going to lock this thread because we do not use the forums for Customer Service anymore and this specific board is for newbie Rock Crawling questions only. Now that we have multiple sales personnel, we are focusing our customer service support through the phone lines and have been receiving very positive response from people as a result. So if you couldn't get through earlier this summer, I encourage you to try calling us Monday-Thursday toll free at 888-942-7295 or locally at 559-252-7295.
Additional info I'd like to include regarding our customer service is that in the past we had leveraged technology into 9 avenues for customer support: Phone, Forum Customer Support, Forum Product Support, four Private Message accounts, eight Personal Email accounts, one main Sales Email account, Webmaster contact account, Live Chat monitored by 3 technicians, and Walk-In service and support. This was
by far and wide the most coverage in our industry but as you can imagine it became overwhelming so we have removed most of this and are encouraging everyone to please contact us direct by phone.
Regards,
BigMike
