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My transmission was leaking oil into the bell housing so it was pretty obvious that the seal on the shaft was worn. I decided I'd replace it and the one on the shift rod (where it enters the side of the tranny).

When I refilled the transmission I used Mobil1 synthetic tranny oil. I refilled it when the tranny was sitting on the floor jack since that was easier than doing it in the car. I also tipped the tranny slightly to make it easier to get the stuff out of the bottle. The Haynes manual said I needed 2.6 quarts, but I couldn't even put 2 quarts in before it was running out of the fill hole.

I did this about 2 weeks ago. For about a week I've been noticing that if I'm in 2nd gear and I put in the clutch to coast (like coming up to a light and getting ready to downshift to 1st) that I'd hear a noise that sounded like 2 pieces of metal being rubbed against each other. Not a grinding noise, but kind of a loud shshshshshsh sound. It didn't happen all the time, but it did often.

I've changed from traditional oil to synthetic and the weather has gotten colder too so there were lots of things to thing about as causes for this. I really expected that I was LOW on tranny fluid. Since I was suspicious about whether I'd gotten the correct amount of fluid in the tranny I decided to check it first - I got about an 8" circle of fluid on my driveway when I unscrewed the plug.

Since I let some of the fluid out, I've not experienced this noise under the same conditions. I'm not knowledgeable about transmissions, but I'm guessing that 2nd gear must be in the upper part of the gear cluster and that when you have too much oil in the tranny that part of the mechanism must be getting more oil than it is supposed to, hence the noise when the wheels are turning the gears while the clutch is engaged.

I was worried that I'd gotten some kind of contamination into the transmission, so I'll take this solution if it holds up!

P.S. - if you are looking to change your own input shaft seal, just go right down to your FLAPS and buy a transmission seal puller tool. It's $10 or so and nothing else is gonna get that thing out of there except this tool! (It's a good thing those broken pliers are Snap-On.)