348 Gear oil dipstick spins - won't tighten

Hello hello,

Reporting in from the depths of stripped aluminum threads in a bad spot here. Changed the gear oil for the first time today because the primary drain plug was leaking quite a lot, theoretically atleast. Everything down here was pretty soaked and had drips on it and figured this was the most likely culprit. Figured i'd take this opportunity to learn how to do it and make an afternoon out of it. All went successful until I tried to put the dipstick back in to tighten it and it was freely spinning once it was all the way in. When I originally pulled the dipstick out I did see "shards of stuff" between the dipstick threads but thought it was locktite with how it looked, in hindsight, it was not. When removing the dipstick to inspect its threads there was a pretty huge shard of aluminum that I pulled off of it and realized what happened. It's very hard to overtighten due to how cramped it is down there and having to use the extension pivots.

Either way, whether my fault or the previous person who changed the gear oil, the threads are stripped in a tight spot. I phoned a fellow 348 stooge and their recommendation was to buy a tap of the correct size and carefully re-tap the hole then use a breakable loc-tite as ideally i'm not going to be checking this for a long time.

As a side note too, I put 4 quarts in so far and though hard to read, seems like it's just a hair below the "max" line, Is that alright? Bought 5 quarts, and quart #5 is left unopen because its apparently full as is.

Any advice would be appreciated. Drilling this is going to be my worst fear due to all the crap that'll fall into the transmission.

 

Two of my "phone a friend" calls I had today about this also said just loctite it and let it rip. I'll grab some tomorrow and let the glue do the work.