I recently bought a 03 civic hybrid for a fairly cheap price. The first thing I noticed was the radiator was leaking into the transmission in which I had to buy a new radiator to prevent further leaking. I flushed out the cooling system along with draining the trans fluid and filling 3 times. My issue that i'm having now is it seems like water is still entering the transmission. The cvt fluid has gone from a pinkish clear to a milky cloudy white color. Am I doing something wrong here. Is there another spot where water can enter the transmission or am I done for and needing to replace the tranny.

 

Did you run the car and get the CVT warm between each drain/fill?

 

Yes I did. I wonder if I might've overfilled it with to much transmission fluid. Doesn't it cause a milky frothy color within the transmission fluid. I should double check my levels.

 

milky/white/cloudy/frothy all scream water.

It may just be that you didn't get it all out. 3X changes gets about 92% of the original fluid out and diluted with new, but I have no idea how much water (or how little) it takes to foam up.

 

Or air. The cloudiness only tells you that there are a lot of interfaces between two materials with different indices of refraction, it doesn't indicate what the two materials are. (They can even be the same material in different phases, google "critical opalescence".) It probably is water still, but you need to rule out the possibility that the CVT is foaming the transmission fluid.

So it might be a good idea to put some of the milky fluid in a glass tube, mark the top level with a Sharpie, seal the top with some plastic wrap and tape, and then let it sit until the emulsion breaks down. If the contaminant is water the total level will not change and there will be a water phase at the bottom of the tube. If the contaminant is air the fluid level will fall and there will be no water at the bottom of the tube. A centrifuge would speed things up considerably, on the off chance one is available. If things are really bad there could be both water and air present.

Use a glass container rather than a plastic one because the transmission fluid might dissolve the plastic.

The idea of a Honda CVT with water in it worries me. These transmissions fail when they see the wrong type of transmission fluid, or the right one isn't changed often enough, or they are not kept scrupulously clean inside. One can only imagine what awful things a CVT might do if anything rusted, even just a little.