manual shifting need help...

[0to60in6min]

hi all,

1988 2WD Carat.. on a trip the shifting went bad.. we get it fixed by a mechanic.. replacing the rear shifter component... after that the shifting is quite hard to move the lever... I'd think it will get better for a while ...because of the new parts.. but not...

I can't go back to the mechanic .. a 1000 miles away...
so I try to fix it it myself.. the shifting is OK.. I find all the gears.. but it's very tough to move the shifting lever..

could you please help.. thanks

[dobryan]

Are the rear parts well lubed or dry? There is a ball and cup there that needs grease.
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[Ahwahnee]

It is hard to tell from that photo and the loose way in which the boot is sitting - but perhaps the ball has popped up in the cup aways. If so that could stress the shift rod and linkage making it difficult to shift.

The ball should bottom in the cup, be well-greased and the boot should engage the groove around the top end of the ball and be fully down over the cup.

I would remove the nut that secures the arm to the shaft into the trans - then work on seating the ball and getting the boot in place.

These are the components I refer to:

[Zeitgeist 13]

If I had to guess, I'd say the rear section of the shift assembly is off by a couple splines, and needs to be rotated over to the driver side.
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[0to60in6min]

thanks all for the help...

everything was done with new parts.. well lubed.. but somehow the shifting is harder than before the fix..
the picture shows the connecting is off to the right... I try to make shifting smoother/easier... but don't know how or what to do and he's too far away to go back.

thanks again

[shagginwagon83]

I want to say your mechanic dropped the whole rear rod. Put the rod back in, upside down. It doesn't look lined up correctly with the cup. I'm just guessing.
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Brandon
"Jo Ann" - '83.5 Westfalia EJ22e w/Peloquin
Instagram @joannthevan

[0to60in6min]

I was there but not watching him all the time, I don't think the rod is upside down .. but it could be.. I have to look at another van to compare but I am away from home..

is the bent section on the right of the picture looking right to you?

thanks

[shagginwagon83]

Yeah that's what I was talking about...but this picture makes it seem yours is right. Also the 'boot' is on the cup in the photo below. I don't think that is your issue. So it finds the gears correctly, but it is just hard to move?

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Brandon
"Jo Ann" - '83.5 Westfalia EJ22e w/Peloquin
Instagram @joannthevan

[tencentlife]

Unless he drove the pin out and flipped the cup on the shaft, there's no way he flipped the shaft. That doesn't look like a new cup, and the shaft looks right to me.

Dan, first thing to do is loosen those two rear bushing bracket bolts just to where you can make the bracket move up and down. You'll see there's a small range of vertical positioning. Push it as high as it can go and retighten.

This is one of the two the most common mistakes made on that rear assembly (the other is putting the bracket on the rear of the mounting tabs, which makes the linkage pop out of 2nd and 4th, if they can be engaged at all) ). When the bracket is installed in a low position the ball rides too high up the inside of the cup. This reduces the leverage available to get in and out of registered gear positions, and at the extremes the ball will actually hang on the rim of the cup and make it really hard or impossible to get out of some gears once engaged, usually 3rd and 4th since that's where the angle is largest (and of course that gets mistaken for a 3/4 slider failure!).

Other than grease in the cup itself (which just collects dirt if the boot isn't intact, and those boots don't last) I find the whole shifter mechanism works best with no grease anywhere else. The nylon and delrin parts are self-lubricating so need no grease to run on steel. The grease feels OK at first, but collects dust and turns to sticky crud. The whole mess stays cleaner and works much much snappier running dry. Grease in the cup is good because the aluminum cup will actually wear faster than the nylon ball, so it can use some help, but it only helps if the boot is intact, otherwise grease turns to grime and adds drag.

Overall it's a bodgy system, although I'm amazed it can work as well as it does. There is a cable-actuated system available, but really a hydraulic linkage would be much simpler and more compact and give by far the most positive actuation. One-a these days...
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[0to60in6min]

yes it's easy to find all gears but it's very hard to move the shift lever back and forth - the front linkage is almost new (a few thousand miles) and it's looking good.

the problem began with hard to find the gears so we got the rear linkage replaced, now we find the gear and it's very stiff as is if the rod was bent but it was not.

thanks

[Ahwahnee]

[0to60in6min]

thank you Chris,

you mean the 2 bolts that hold the bracket on the engine or the 2 bolts on the brackets?

note: he put on a new aluminum cup and ball (the whole kit from Van Cafe), he tried it, didn't like it, took new cup out, use the new ball, and put the old cup in ... so far so good as getting in the gears but...

[shagginwagon83]

I did the van cafe kit. I regrettably had to use a lot of elbow grease to remove the cup once the pin was removed. I did not drop the whole bar at the mid point. I believe it cause me to be off a spline or two to cause shifting issues.

I used the van cafe cup. strange to why he didn't use it. I believe disconnecting the 1x 13mm nut from the transmission will give you an idea of what is going on. You would be disconnected from the transmission, test how the shifting is then.
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Brandon
"Jo Ann" - '83.5 Westfalia EJ22e w/Peloquin
Instagram @joannthevan

[0to60in6min]

after he remove the new cup, he did the shifting by hand at the gearbox and all went well... for some reason unclear to me he said that the old cup is better than the new one and also said that the drilled hole on the bottom of the cup is slightly off... I just believe him no arguing..

[?Waldo?]

As Ahwahnee said, remove the nut that holds the ball onto the shaft and lift the ball out of the cup.

Check the shifting. Is it still stiff?

If yes, then you know something is binding in the linkage. If no, then you know that it is at the ball/cup interface or within the trans itself.

[zuhandenheit]

I have a tangential but small question (especially for 10c but I'd appreciate any replies). Well, my asking of the question may be verbose, but it is essentially very simple, I think.

On my 82, I grease the two nylon balls. Just a few days ago I cleaned out the old grease (which indeed had hardened to crud over a few years) and refreshed. The bracket is steel and I don't want wear on the nylon balls. In my collection of parts (including two other transmissions), I somehow don't have any replacement parts.

The tube/shaft part of the assembly has a rubber o-ring in place of whatever bushing originally fit into the groove on the plastic end of the shaft. I lightly grease the tube/o-ring with silicone.

It's hard to come by parts for the old shifter system. I've had to make my own bushings (out of cutting boards), and as I mentioned, had to use a rubber o-ring in place of a rather different part that I couldn't source.

My van shifts very well (adding my own bushing above the fuel tank, to replace the NLA part, made a very big difference). I'd like to keep it that way, and above all, I don't want anything to break when I'm in the middle of a big trip. (This has me thinking I should probably give some attention to the ball/spring etc at the base of the shifter, which I haven't inspected.)

Anyway, again, my question here is just this: should I be greasing the nylon balls and bracket on the older shifter system?

Thanks!

[ALIKA T3]

Like Zeitgest said, it's in neutral and seems a couple splines off.

Loosen the clamp by the sliding door, have somebody keeping the shifter in the cabin in neutral, half point between left and right. Tighten it. Done. You might be one spline off after that, but it will take no more than 2 trials to tune it if necessary.
You can modify the throw if you're unhappy with it by looking at how deep the splines were at the said clamp and put it back where it was.

Cheers!
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