The reccomended way is changing the fluid more frequently until it stays cherry red DO NOT power flush it that will for sure mess it up.

Let your transmission fluid drain overnight. You will drain twice as much fluid this way

if your fluid is particularly nasty, just drop the pan, do a fluid/filter change every 500 miles or so, until you are happy with it.

Using a machine to flush the oil out can create problems. If you want to do it safely you can you drop the pan and filter, let it drip for an hour or or, refill, and a few hundred (or thousand) miles later do it again....

But having said that a pan and filter drop in my trucks requires about 7qts to fill back up, a pretty significant amount of fluid....

I think they should make something that u can hook up to your tranny cooler lines where u can have a reservoir of new fluid that hooks up to the suction side back to the tranny and a bucket for the used oil coming out of the tranny. would that work?
so is there nobody on here who had didn't have problems with there tranny and then changed the oil and filter then had problems?
u know I've tackled almost everything there is to do with rebuilding autos even ring&pinions, but auto trannies bug me.

No suction on the return side. You would have to have a split container, sealed between new and old fluid. Old fluid coming into container would force new fluid into trans. Since the fluid would still be mixing with dirty fluid in the trans, this would require at least twice the amount of fluid your trans holds, to flush it out, probably closer to three times the volume.

I have an '01 1500 and I got a flush done on it at the garage when they replaced the pan and filter for me (too messy for me, I'll just watch them). I haven't had any problems at all aside from them not believing me a Dodge has to be in neutral for it to power everything and have a true reading..So had to add more (at their expense), but the truck still sounds and shifts great..so no complaints here on the flush. They drained, replaced parts, refilled, and then flushed.

everyone says a flush machine is the worst cuz it stirs everything up, but id u dropped the pan and did a filter change wouldn't it be the best way?

7 quarts, that's a stock pan right, how much do u think is left in the tranny, converter?

I think total capacity is like 12 quarts or so.

Per this sticky in the DIY section, total fill is 11.7 quarts of ATF+4.

I remember when I dropped the pan, it drained about 5 quarts out (nearly filled the little 6quart oil pan I was using). When I pulled the filter, I got another half quart or so. So the pan holds about half the fluid.

If you do this, it's generally considered a good idea to either install a drain plug in the pan or replace the pan with one that has a drain plug. Odds are that you'll be in the tranny again soon.

Read all 80 pages of this thread in the tech section to get some good advice about maintenance and upgrades. Then you can get into some things like removing the check valve and installing a auxiliary filter and cooler.

Myself, I had a slightly slipping transmission. I changed the fluid via pan drop (no flush) and installed a cooler and guess what - I still had a slightly slipping transmission. It didn't fix the problem, but I feel it may have slowed the damage caused by running old dirty fluid through the trans. One day when I have the funds I'll rebuild it per the advice in MonteC's thread. Until then I limp along.