Transaxle fluid change, car slightly tilted

Walked past a fellow working on his car this morning who had "solved" the tilt problem by aiming his car downhill and propping up each ramp under a front wheel with a short piece of 2x6 perpendicular to the ramp. The boards were flat on the concrete. Unfortunately the ramps were entirely supported at two points where the edge of that wood contacted the two sides of the plastic ramp. Also I suppose a little by the line at the shallow end of the ramp which was on the concrete. The back wheels were chocked. If I had to design a method to break plastic car ramps using only the weight of a car and two pieces of wood, it would have been this. The pressure at the wood/plastic contact point must be huge. Rough drawing of just the front wheel:

 

Finally got around to doing this yesterday.

For leveling the car I went with the following. To get the car high enough for the jack handle to work in the front it is first driven up on a piece of 2x12 on each side. Except those pieces of 2x12 have both split lengthwise right down the middle, making essentially a set of 4 2x6 boards, which are pushed together to make a seamless platform on each side. (I never go under the car when it is supported on wood.) Recall from a post above that the driveway is 4" lower at the downhill wheel than the uphill wheel. So, the car is parked facing downhill with the rear wheels chocked. At the "fill" stage in the ATF procedure it has been lowered first onto those boards arranged as two stacked 2x6 on each side under the front wheels. That provides 3" of lift (ignoring the trig correction for the slope, which is small). Then a tape measure was placed at the fender on the front wheel well, right at the center of the tire, and the distance to the ground measured with a tape measure, then the car is raised one more inch. Again, ignoring the trig correction. To the limits of my ability to measure with the tools at hand, that is flat.

The car makes a lot of short trips, which is usually considered "severe duty" in many service manuals. This change was at 5 years and 9 months and 24993 miles. (I was not aiming for 25k, it just worked out that way.) The fluid in bulk was black but a drop on paper was sort of a reddish black, redder at the edges. There were no metal shavings on the magnet, just some black stuff that wiped off, probably the same black as in the bulk of the fluid.

The one bizarre thing is that when the fill plug was pulled, when the car was very much "nose up", some ATF started to dribble out. Just like with the old fluid. No measurement of the angle but the front was something like a foot above where it was when level (as above). Overfilled? Well, drained everything out (here referring to the old ATF) and it was a cup or so less than a gallon when it was in the disposal container, and only a few drops spilled on the cardboard. When the transmission was filled (at the level position) it started to dribble at around 3.8 or 3.9 (almost but not quite all of the final quart). Cranked the car up to the same position, pulled out the fill tube (0.5 ID vinyl tube) and, it started to dribble out again, about a quarter to half a cup before the fill plug stopped it. Pretty much exactly like what happened with the older ATF fluid. It doesn't make sense to me unless the geometry inside the transmission is very peculiar since the fill port is high on the front of the case, and in a container with a simple geometry, like a cube, rotating it like that will lower the fluid away from that position.