Tranny woes: Grinding Gears

After getting the stang running again, I fried the clutch cable. How long it was gone…I'm not sure. I got off the freeway, pushed in the clutch and tried to downshift…and it wouldn’t come out of gear. I finally tugged it out, pulled off the side of the road and found that my clutch cable had been resting against the header.

Now, in my haste…I may have forced first gear a bit to get going again. After I picked up speed…I shifter without using the clutch, but rather just matching the rev's to the tranny. Shifting wasn’t forced.

After swapping in a new AutoZone cable…I found the gears were grinding while shifting only when accelerating/decelerating. While at a standstill, they will go into gear with ease. I decided to try the stock self adjusting mechanism on the quadrant…and...well…that didn’t go so well. The stock quadrant broke…and the AutoZone cable seized up. I borrowed an adjustable cable and quadrant from my brother and found no matter how I adjusted the cable the grinding between gears was still there.

So…here are the final symptoms.

Gears grind while moving 1-4 both Up shifting and down shifting. 4-5 doesn’t grind, however 5-4 does. It seems rpm sensitive as well. I can shift without grinding…but the rpms have to be under 1k.

I've yet to check the plastic bushing under the shifter…and I'll check the fluid as well. I'm thinking however that I have some bad syncros. It just seems odd that I go from a great shifting tranny, to one that grinds 1-4 just from frying a clutch cable.

srothfuss said:

My first guess is that when you forced it into 1st gear and out of 5th without 'gear matching' the transmission, you probably took off some material from the syncro's.

I doubt very much that your actual gears are damaged just from that and I tend to believe that your soft parts are probably really damaged.

Like you sugguested: Change the trans fluid to get a look at what is floating around in there.

Click to expand...

I never really forced it into first, just out of 5th. I just gave 1st gear some pressure for a brief moment to get rolling again…and then just matched the rpms shifting.

I forgot to mention that double clutching doesn’t help out one bit either.

Either way, a fluid change is a cheap way to get things rolling. If I see bit's and pieces coming out of the drain…I probably wont bother filling it back up with fluid.