2001 Mitsubishi Galant transmission fluid level confusion

Hello all,

I'm having an issue with the fluid level on my car. It's a 2001 mitsubishi galant es (4cyl) with ~140k on it. I decided to do a simple drain and fill because I figured it would be better than nothing at this mileage and the fluid looked a little brown and appeared to be overfilled (fluid above hot even when car is off). I first drained and filled it with about 4 quarts of amsoil atf or so. This is when the level started reading weird. I went to check it at cold to see if it was at least up to that and it didn't look like it was...hmm. Then I filled it up a bit more to about 5qts total and checked again. No dice. I figured since the trains holds about 8qts it would be okay to start and check when the engine was warmed up. I shifted through the gears and stopped at neutral like the manual says to see the level and it looked like it was really really overfilled. Wiped it off to confirm and redipped and then it looked like the dipstick showed as if nothing was there or some spotting and line breaks in the dipstick... Figured I had too much. Drained it again but filled it to about 4qts.. Repeated procedure of checking.. Still looks like it is empty on cold and with hot it still shows that it is overfilled when shifting through gears.. I am very confused. The car seems to drive fine and shift better than before when driving for a few minutes but I definitely don't want the level to be too low or high for fear of damaging the trans.

How could this be? I am following the procedure for checking wrong or is it really not filled up? I thought that if you drain it through the plug on these models it never drains it all the way? Has anyone else encountered this before? I couldn't find anything relating to this by searching.

your method sounds right. Trust yourself that you did it right then.
Did you park on a level surface? When you drained it, the 2nd time, since you know you put in 5 qts, did you get 5qts out?

After a drain, our cars take about 5.5-5.8qts of fluid. I would personally recommend to only use Diamond SPIII fluid, I know Amsoil makes quality fluid, but our transmissions are known for being very picky about the fluid type. You can read the instructions on how to drain and refill clearly here -

https://www.thegalantcenter.org/show...r-tranny-Fluid

Thanks all,

It turns out I was a little shy of adding the right amount of fluid so the dipstick wasn't reading correctly. I drained it again for good measure and refilled it till I got the correct reading. Oops!