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Replacing OIL MTX

Devil's advocate here - Steve from Tousley posted this on the Focus forum recently:

Ford used to use mercon in manual transmissions, the old Contour/Mystique MTX was one.

Guess what a huge seller is for old Contour/Mystique MTXs?

Synchros.
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Andy Bennett said:
Devil's advocate here - Steve from Tousley posted this on the Focus forum recently:
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sure, but old Contour/Mystiques are, well, old. synchros are designed to be a wear item, so its normal for higher mileage transmissions to need synchros. Now, if they were notorious for having worn synchros early on in their life (say less than 50K miles) I would believe the fluid to be a possible cause for that, but they arent.
 
Bwahaha!! Thank goodness for Steve! He is right though. I have run the tranny cocktail, the "recommended" mercon fluid and the honey. The honey has been the best by far! totally worth the extra money. These cars do seem to be very hard on synchros until they get filled with proper fluid. There is a reason that Ford changed the recommended fluid to the honey. Didn't the Focus MTX75's get honey from the factory?
 
Well, the infamous "3rd-gear synchro" problem isn't exactly rare on the CDW-27. And it's pretty much non-existent in the Focus.
 
tsSVT said:
Bwahaha!! Thank goodness for Steve! He is right though. I have run the tranny cocktail, the "recommended" mercon fluid and the honey. The honey has been the best by far! totally worth the extra money. These cars do seem to be very hard on synchros until they get filled with proper fluid. There is a reason that Ford changed the recommended fluid to the honey. Didn't the Focus MTX75's get honey from the factory?
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I have also driven MTX75s with various fluids and didnt notice a difference in shift feel (other than the rod shift having a better feel overall but thats a design difference not a fluid difference). any car that either has a lot of miles or gets shifted a lot is going to have synchro wear. a strictly city car will have more wear for the same miles as a highway car. also, a performance oriented car (like the SVT) is likely to have more synchro wear due to many more fast high RPM shifts (which are harder on the synchros than a low RPM smooth shift). How many non-SVTs actually seem to have synchro problems? very few as they are generally driven easier. The Focus is the same way, most of them will be driven easier than a lot of the SVTC owners do on here. as for the Factory fill, the Focus was filled with Mercon up until sometime in 01 IIRC (i know 2000 still got Mercon).

Andy Bennett said:
Well, the infamous "3rd-gear synchro" problem isn't exactly rare on the CDW-27. And it's pretty much non-existent in the Focus.
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I would say its actually pretty rare overall. what you see on here and NECO is a small percentage of owners, who generally are harder on their cars. as i stated, driving the car harder is going to cause more synchro wear.
 
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