[Daox]

I'm just about done with the Civic repairs which means I'll finally get a little time to start on fixing the Tercel. Well, my mind can't stay there, it has to jump ahead. As you may know, I have a pretty short commute of 7 miles. In winter, my cars don't really even get up to full operating temperature for a good portion of the winter (and I don't use much heat either). Also, most of my trips besides work are around 5-10 miles. I don't have you tell you that these short trips are brutal on mpgs. So, I'm constantly thinking of ideas to speed up warm up times.

Well, the Tercel is my blank slate, and my ability to mod is the limit. This car is currently worth its scrap price. However, its my first car and the sentimental attachment is still there. So, I'm not looking to spend huge money, but I'm also wanting to make it what I want, and this means I'm willing to do some things that I wouldn't be with a car that I might sell in the future.

I have a fairly extensive list of ideas that I want to try, but the one I want to talk about in this thread is using engine coolant to help speed up the heating of the transmission (in my case its currently a 4 speed manual with 75W90 oil). Now, if you were listening you heard that my coolant temp sometimes never even gets up to normal operating temperature. Well, lets forget that for now because I plan on solving that issue by insulating the engine block, and I am assuming at this point that warm up times will be drastically improved by that. So, now that I have extra heat again, why not use that to warm up that nice thick transmission fluid?

I did a bunch of googling to see if there was ever testing done to see what kind of gains there were from warming up trans oil. I couldn't find anything. I know BMW did some testing or something with this but I couldn't find it. So, I'm asking the mass of EM knowledge if they have any idea if this would even be worth it?