Urgent - Gearbox problem - advice needed

[S4Jem]

I need some urgent advice regarding my gearbox.

My shirt shifter doesn't like reverse, so i need to force it in to engage. However, today when I went out and applied the usual muscle to select reverse, the gear stick went floppy. I found I could only engage second and fourth (still very Floppy) and could not engage the upper gears.

I have removed the short shifter but cannot see anything obvious which would cause the floppyness. However, the below picture shows two rods which pertrude and both of these rods move around quite freely (up.down, left and right)

Have i damaged the gearbox? or could it be the short shifter?

Your help will be appreciated.

[s4woody]

sounds to me that your brute force mite ave put the shifter out of alignment..did you try adjusting the shifter to find the other gears before you removed the complete assembly..

[jfeb]

I reckon Woody is probably right.

[grizz]

What type of shifter do you have ?? i've had problems with the cheap type from ebay , get a good one eg tonoga... g

[S4Jem]

sounds to me that your brute force mite ave put the shifter out of alignment..did you try adjusting the shifter to find the other gears before you removed the complete assembly..

Hi Woody,

I didn't try adjusting as I wanted to change the shifter anyway. Is it possible to break something in the linkage by using brute force to change gear?. I can engage some gears but it is still very floopy when engaged and the movement out of gear is all over the place (up, down, sideways). I would have expected the link rods to remain fairly static, however, there is a hell of a lot of play which leads me to believe it may be something worse.

I have assembled the other shifter so will try a replace it tomorrow to see if it is just a case of alignment.

Cheers

[S4Jem]

What type of shifter do you have ?? i've had problems with the cheap type from ebay , get a good one eg tonoga... g

Its a tanoga one that is causing the problem so I have purchased the ebay one to see if this makes any difference...may have to go back to stock if the ebay one is not upto the job.

[jfeb]

I have the same difficulty with selecting reverse with my Tanoga short shift kit.

[h8cak]

Sounds to me like you have dislodged the ridgid bar which is that top one in the pic i think? Yes it is. The top yellow looking bar with 1 hole in it should be solid and NOT move

[s4woody]

i had fitted a tanoga to my car..when i had trouble with reverse i just turned the nut an bolt round and gave it a little trim with a dremmel..sorted..

[h8cak]

Ahh the dremmel. A must have i would agree.........

[S4Jem]

Woody...you were bang on the money - good lad

Have change from a tanoga short shifter to the ebay one and what a difference. I can select reverse without any problems and have a straight throw between 1st and 2nd, whereas before you had to push to one side then the other in order to go from 1st to 2nd, and struggle to engage reverse.

A huge relief as I was expecting the worse....only issue (whether you can call it that) is that shifter height is very short. I had to cut of the stem that sits beneath the leather trim in order to get the gear knob on. I suppose i'll get used to it, just glad all is in order.

I've also managed to lose a couple of screws, any ideas where I can get a torx screw (part no: N 104 541 01) and a hex nut (part no: N 902 867 03) from?

A big thanks for all the advice.

[DavidT]

Strange, Tanoga shifters are excellent quality but there are two types. I wonder if you had the wrong type for your car ?

[S4Jem]

I think the problem with my Tanoga is that in order to engage reverse you need to throw it a distance to the left, however, the carbon insert with the leather gaitor stops the throw reaching over this far, so you have to really slam it across in order to get it in. Problem being, is that if you set the throw to the right a tad you end up engaging reverse as opposed to first.

I've had to try on a few occasions with the Ebay jobby different settings so I can reach reverse by pushing down and not having the carbon trim interfering too much. Still not perfect but, better than before, Unless someone can advise on an alternative?