I've had no problems with my trans before, but tonight I was running a mustang and ran out 4th. The run ended, so I let it run down a bit, then went to shift into 5th. It wouldn't budge. I tried forcing it a bit but didn't want to do more damage. I cruised around a bit in 4th, then tried applying a bit of pressure to the shifter towards neutral while mudulating the clutch, trying to "kick" it free.

After several minutes it went into a semi nuetral where it was somewhat in teh nuetral position but was still in gear. A little while longer I was able to get it into 5th. Now I have 1,2,4,5, and 6th, but it won't go into 3rd or reverse. There is also a weird feeling through the shifter as I move towards the left bank of gears (1,2) and it just feels off a bit, although it will go into 4th 5 and 6 normally.

It runs fine when it's in gear, and I can't hear any weird noises coming from the shifter, so I'm guessing the gears are ok. I'm leaning towards a linkage problem. I am running the stock hurst with a short stick on it. I remember the ads for the pro 5.0 mentioning something about protecting against bent forks or something. Could this be my problem?

I am about 50 miles from my house right now and have limited access to tools. I could probaly get it home. Can anyone give me some idea of what I could be dealing with?

I do shift hard sometimes, but I can't remember if I did a hard shift this time, and I have never had any symptoms before.

Thanks a lot in advance.

 

Something similar happened to my F-350, turned out to be a bad slave cylinder. I guess thats a good a starting point as I can give.

 

pretty sure your syncro assembly for 3rd and 4th is destroyed or came apart. Read my posts on t-56 problems. I am kinda having the same problems.

 

After looking up slave cylinder and 1-bad-z28's posts I think I'm leaning towards slave cylinder. I got in it this morning and it went into reverse fine. It binded up a little right after and wouldn't get out of neutral but once I got it in it worked alright. It still wouldn't go into third at first, but all the other gears worked fine, although there was something a little differant about the feel. After a bit, I tried to get it into third, and it would go in, but would be difficult to take out, and the trans wouldn't act normal for a bit. There are no abnormal sounds other then the fact that I get a bit of grind when I try to go into fourth after revving out second, or try to downshift to second from fourth even after revmatching.

Basically, it feels fine if I baby it, cept for the loss of third occasionally.

I picked up a slave cylinder but when I read my manual I see that 98+ v8s have an internal set-up that require dropping the trans. I just am not set up to do that where I live.

Are there any other things that could be going on here that I could check/replace without dropping the trans? If not, then does anyone have any recommendations as to where to send it? If it's coming out once I don't want to have to do it again so I would like to get it a little beefed up so I don't have to worry about it, along with replacing the clutch and flywheel.

 

Sounds very similar to what happened to me. My 4th stuck and once getting it free 3rd would grind any time I tried to use it and 4th wouldn't work at all. Turns out it was the stock keys in the 3/4 slider assembly that slung apart. Replaced them with a billet key set from t56rebuilds.com and that solved it. The bottom line is that just about everything is internal, so regardless of whether its a bent fork, keys or syncros it will have to be torn down.