1993 Manual Transmission woes :-((

[c7j6y1]

Well so my 500 Ex may have been a too good to be true deal

So last night i was accelerating onto the highway, was in 3rd, and in the process of shifting into 4th, when the trans jumped, the tires screeched and there was a Thump!

I quickly pushed the clutch in and killed the engine, and rolled to a stop.

Well after some quick looking around, I saw no fluid under the truck, so anything appearing out of the ordinary. I got back into the truck, started it and tried to shift into 1st, well when it was no go. So i put it into neutral (or what i thought was neutral and slowly letup on the clutch.

Well turns out it was in gear!

after some more roadside diogonistics, I decided it was in 3rd and i would try to limp it home.

well It was in 3rd. I made it home with out incident, other than cursing at the red lights i came up to and felt like i was burning thru 1000 miles of clutch to get it home.

So long story short...

Shifter says its in Neutral, Trans says its in 3rd.

I talked to a trans shop this morning and nobody is saying that the trans is likely screwed, best case is that the Linkage is the problem,

worst case is that i need a rebuild... but im not spending 2K to pay somebody to rebuild...

anybody have similar problems? if so whats ur solutions?

 

[jwv3]

Hard to say without tearing the tranny open, but I'd guess you have a broken shifter fork or something messed up in the top cover with the shift rails.

I know when you have one apart, and engage two different gear clusters, the tranny output shaft will lock up solid. Sounds like that might have happened while you were driving.

If you can pull the tranny yourself, you can remove the top cover and see pretty much what is going on.

 

[c7j6y1]

well... i guess i am magic...

i was driving it to the trans shop and it shuddered and somehow its working just fine now!

 

[Vargas]

This a wild guess, so give it all the consideration you want.

I'd say you have a broken tooth swimming around in the gear lube. When it jammed between two gears, the shift fork deflected far enough that it could not disengage 3rd.

I had something similar happen in a different vehicle. The temporary solution is to get the loose bits of metal out of the gearbox. I had to pull the transmission and flip it over to dump out a surprising amount of metal debris. Reinstalled and refilled, it lasted another year until the countershaft broke.

 

[c7j6y1]

Oh yeah I'm going to get it serviced and stuff when I get the $$$ to do so.