So a little back story here. My sister drives 2007 V6 Sport 4wd with 155k on it. A couple weeks ago she was driving up in sequoia national park with a friend and the A/T temp light kicks on and she gets the Christmas tree of lights on the dash. Calls me panicking. Says she was driving at ~10mph following traffic up winding roads in 100*+ heat. I tell her to pull over and let it cool and keep the revs up, it will be fine. I will change the fluid when she gets home. She lets it cool for 30 minutes an finishes the weekend trip of ~800miles.
Fast forward to today I finally got a chance install the new B&M trans cooler I ordered so this wont happen again and flush the system. Keep in mind, as far as I know, the ATF has never been changed in 150K miles so shame on us for that, but that is besides the point.
We got the cooler mounted up and ran all the lines, drained the ~3.5 qts from the pain and filled it back up with fresh fluid, old stuff was pretty bad, not horrible but bad. Unhooked the return line so we can pump the old stuff out and flush the system.
Start the truck, 5s of idle no fluid flowing out of the coolers yet. 10s, still nothing. 30s, still nothing. Shut it down, double check everything and put an extra quart in the pan, maybe it was really low. Start it up again, still nothing. Let it idle for 1min, nothing. Put it in gear and goes in gear so it has oil but nothing is flowing through the coolers.
Started following the plumbing and taking things apart as we go. Pulled off the input into the factory water to oil cooled in the radiator and look what we found:
It appears to be a plug from the original packaging, from the factory maybe? It looks like a purpose built plug for that location and it fit very snugly in there and obviously impeded all the flow.
We learned the transmission has an internal bypass so in the event your external coolers become plugged, you can still drive. And you can drive for a long, long time.
We we dumbfounded to find that and VERY surprised the trans had not destroyed its self.
This is the ATF that came out:
Anyone else ever had this issue?