Best Maintenance for 2003 Ford 450 Transmission

FORD dealers have a machine made for flushing the transmission and replacing the fluid. Is there something wrong with doing that?

There is a video for the 2005 E350. It shows an external filter, easy to change.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P95dJlBScro

Identify what transmission it is and get a deep aluminum pan for it. You can have the new pan drilled and tapped for a temp probe when you order it, and it will have a drain plug in it, so future fluid changes and pan removals are much less messy and easy. New deep pans can add as much as 4 qts to the capacity of the transmission which goes a long ways in keeping it cool.

I can suggest one place www.Yourcovers.com as they are quite nice and easy to deal with. For this transmission, there are probably several companies that make deep aluminum pans. For the transmission in my Sprinter, PML (which is www.yourcovers.com) was the only one. They have a very broad line of pans. Make sure you know what year CHASSIS the coach is on, probably the year prior to the coach.

Charles

Thanks everyone very helpful.

CloudDriver's advice is best. I do this ~100,000 miles. My pan was last dropped around 170k, and now I just do the pump and fill method, and also use an inline Magnefine filter. Fancy fluid isn't necessary. Anything meeting Mercon-V spec is good fluid, even the parts store stuff. I use Napa because it costs under $4/qt.

I'll hit 420,000 miles this weekend. Over half those are towing miles, and my combined weight is typically 20-22,000 pounds, with lots steep, rugged forest roads. Sometimes with two trailers in tow!

CloudDriver wrote:
Our Class C is on the 2003 E450 chassis. I have changed the fluid twice myself in the driveway using this procedure. The maintenance schedule calls for fluid changes at 30,000 mile intervals. I went a bit over the interval the first two changes and have the fluid for the third change waiting for a decent day to do it again. Never dropped the pan and don't plan to do so this time either.

So far we have 95,000 miles with no transmission issues.

I used this procedure on my old 93 ford 4EOD tranny except I never dropped the pan, I pumped out old the fluid using a 1/4" plastic tube and hand pump. No need to do a filter change at 45,000 miles plus no pan dropping mess. I pumped out 7 quarts, then used the aforementioned method and pumped out another 7 from the torque converter, cooler and lines then with the engine off I pumped out another 2 quarts from the converter and lines with the hand pump. Thus removed a total of 16 quarts before wasting any new fluid. Refilled and wasted two quarts for further cleaning for good measure. All late and hard shifts and hard clucks into reverse completely disappeared. Used the synthetic dex merc blend.

Our Class C is on the 2003 E450 chassis. I have changed the fluid twice myself in the driveway using this procedure. The maintenance schedule calls for fluid changes at 30,000 mile intervals. I went a bit over the interval the first two changes and have the fluid for the third change waiting for a decent day to do it again. Never dropped the pan and don't plan to do so this time either.

So far we have 95,000 miles with no transmission issues.

What I did was add a spin on filter and a temp gauge.Every fluid change then change the filter.
Then you don't have to drop the pan.