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Glen
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Joined: 03-13-2005
Location: Placerville, California USA
Posts: 21
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I recently replaced the clutch and the car drove fine a couple times.  The third time I drove it, I was uable to shift into reverse after parking for a few minutes.  I drove the car home and parked it.  The shifter seemed sloppy, but I was able to get into all the forward gears. 

The next day, I went out to check it out, and it went into reverse just fine.  A few days later, I backed out of my garage, drove it a few miles and was again unable to get it into reverse after parking for a few minutes.  The forward gears are fine.  Good thing it's a light car.  Is this an internal thing in the transmission, or could it be due to the sloppy shifter?

 

Thanks for your help.

Glen #19667

Jim Sohl
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Joined: 03-26-2005
Location: Chandler, Arizona USA
Posts: 39
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Hi Glen, I'm going to guess that you have a 5-speed with the high sn number you state.  It may be that the pressure plate is not withdrawing quite far enough.  That is, just barely enough to get the job done when cold and when things heat up, expansion of some part or the other takes up the tiny amount gap between the pressure plate and everything else.  If this is true, a little adjustment should set things right.  However, Getrag shift linkages are very sensitive to wear.  The design used just is intolerant of play from just about any joint, bushing, pin, and the like.  The result is that as wear accumulates, the fork selector (inside the tranny) gets less and less of a 'clean' or full message from the shift lever.  Again, for reasons that may be temperature related, sometimes you grab the fork and sometimes not.  The reverse gear is straight-cut teeth, no synchronizer.  As such, the drive-out shaft must be very nearly stationary and, now here come your possible clutch problem, the cluster gear must also be nearly stationary for reverse to engage.  If the clutch is dragging, even a little, then the cluster gear will not want to stay still long enough to engage straight teeth without the aid of a synchro.  Result? For any or all of the above reasons, reverse seems to work when the zodiac is aligned right and under other conditions, not.  Try taking up the clutch cable first.  That's easy, and may be all that's wrong.  The care and feeding of the Getrag has been covered elsewhere on the board.  Happy hunting!



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