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The gate on my '91 C900 5 spd manual tranny (c. 165K miles) has no slot for first gear: i.e., the shifter just won't move up into where the first gear gate would normally be, and jiggling around doesn't do it. Otherwise all the other gears, including reverse are just fine: no grinding, no falling out of gear, no whiny sounda, and the synchros all seem OK.
The linkage connecter isn't the newer dog bone type, but the old style flat circular rubber plate. No obvious slack or deterioration or slip in the linkage components. All the adjustments are correct, according to Bentley, including the length of the shifter and that bushing in the front of the shifter console is evidently OK. CMyles says he's never seen this as resulting from an internal problem inside the tranny itself and thinks theres a linkage problem. The one time with another C900 that there was a inaccessible gate (reverse in that case)was caused by a broken front engine mount which let the engine/tranny drop down almost onto the aluminum cross-member, sufficiently skewed the linkage axis to prevent access to the reverse gate. Replacing the engine mount fixed the problem.
Once I started delving deep (I'm replacing the clutch slave cylinder, disk and pressure plate) I see that there's a completely missing bolt which is part of the DS engine mount assembly. The bolt is in place on my other C900.; an 1988. It evidently needs to be inserted from the bottom and hardened up into a reinforced threaded flange. Looks like it will be a major bee-atch to disassemble the DS engine mount/left front front suspension suspension components to replace the bolt from below, as required. i'm thinking that the missing first gear gate problem is similarly the result the engine/tranny being seriously skewed by the incomplete DS engine mount assembly, Has anybody ever had to deal with with something like this before?
Here's a link to a PDF of the engine mount assembly:
http://www.sethathirath.com/missing_bolt_ds_engine_mount.pdf
posted by 98.228.18...
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