tranny housing inspection cover A.W.O.L.!
 

FUNNY STORY. :laughing:

Spent some time with the ranger today. Replaced my broken sway bar links and started to drain/fill the transmission fluid. So my buddys under the car and starts freaking out a bit :scared1: ... take a look down under, and it turns out the inspection cover on the transmission housing (rectangle-ish hole to peek through and take a look at the clutch) is straight up missing. Meaning I could poke-a-da-clutch-a with my hand. MAYBE a quart of fluid came out. Contacted the local dealership and they said that the missing piece does not have a part # and therefore my options are buy a whooole new housing or go to a junkyard and try to find one. At the moment (redneck alert) there's a cut up beer can (so there's some kind of metal) covering the hole held on with rubber cement and duct tape. It's holding at the moment.

STILL, does anyone know an easier way of getting a hold of this part? Also, I'm not sure how it's actually held in.. is there any way it fell off on it's own or was it not replaced the last time I had work done for sure... :sad:

So did you ever manage to find one? I'm curious b/c my 89 Ranger could use one too, and I've never found out where a person could get one.


A couple of years my flywheel teeth chipped for some reason and it got to where the starter wouldn't turn it anymore. I had to pull the transmission and put in a new flywheel. (Put in new clutch too, since I was at it anyway.) Maybe there could have been another cause, but I wondered if a rock or something had gotten caught up in there and got jammed up in the flywheel teeth. So those covers do matter.

I managed to snag at junk yard. Here in bc canada out of 9 ranger and 4 explorers i only got 1 plug lol. they are really hard to find. You can either buy a new one for about 30 bucks on a few sites or make one out of a piece of rubber and rtv. Its only really a big deal for 4x4s. My friend drove without it for 5 years no problems. Seems pretty stupid they dont make them anymore.