Let me tell you how important o-rings are

Come to think about it I could talk about Space Shuttle Challenger. Being a Floridian here, we aren't made for cold weather. Turns out, neither were space shuttles. In January 1986 Challenger was set to launch from Kennedy Space Center. As with many shuttle flights, the launch got pushed back. Ended up sitting on the pad for over the week and that week happened to be unusually cold. So, the space shuttle has two giant solid rocket boosters strapped to its sides, each booster is manufactured in 4 segmented and joined together perfectly to essentially have one single piece. In those seals are, of course, big o-rings. While that shuttle sat on that pad, there was something taking place in those seals that the engineers hadn't thought about. They were becoming stiff, and one of them began to harden and crack. Well, by the time the shuttle actually launched, that o-ring was too damaged. 70 seconds after launch the o-ring couldn't hold back the exhaust gases from the solid rocket motor. All that pressure started leaking out the seal, halfway up the solid rocket motor case and that pressure leak began to spread rapidly and shred its way up the motor. Those 7 astronauts died instantly in the explosion. 7 brave men and women, dead, because of one o-ring.


But I didn't actually come here to talk about the Challenger disaster. I came to talk about my rover. A couple weeks ago I was running through the 60K service on my D2 and had ordered a transmission filter kit. Came with the gasket, filter, and two o-rings. I was playing around with it and putting the o-rings on the hole flanges and straightening out the gasket; anyways I didn't open up the transmission sump until the next day. I was racing the sun and it was coming down to the last 30 mins of daylight. Not realizing, I put the new filter in without the o-rings. Filled up with fluid, slapped on that fill plug and called it a day. Took the car out to go to the nearest Irish pub and boy did that sucker sound bad. Sluggish, I couldn't even get the thing to move unless I revved it up to 2500 rpm. Gears kept slipping, sometimes couldn't even downshift. I had to drive it the rest of that night but obviously something was wrong, and the next day I went out to go investigate. That's when I realized I never put those frickin o-rings back on. Tranny sounds fine for the most part now but it's hard to say how much damage was done just in those couple hours without them. Without those seals, the fluid couldn't be sucked up into the gear box and into the torque converter, so fluid kept dripping down but couldn't get cycled back up. Thinking about how dry those gears got scares me. Hopefully this didn't kickstart the slow demise of my transmission, but I'll just keep a couple fingers crossed for now.

So, NEVER FORGET ABOUT O-RINGS is what I guess I am saying. Sorry for all the words I know reading this early in the morning is tough.

 

As you've pointed out...some o-rings are more important than others. Your o-ring issue could result in future issues...but they will be minor in comparision to the other.

Hopefully, you didn't do any damage and she rolls on for many more miles.

Brian.