Transmission trouble
 

Alright I have an 85 rx7 gsl-se the one with the 13b in it. And it won't go into any gear except 5th and reverse. It'll still drive in those gears but won't go into any others. It won't go into gear while its off either, except 5th and reverse. So I don't think its the clutch cylinders? I could be wrong though. I'm fairly new to these so any help would be appreciated.

When you say won't go into a gear do you mean the shifter physically won't go into the position for 1-4 or do you mean it goes into the position but the gear doesn't engage? Did the transmission work before or did you buy it already like that? Do you know the previous owner and can they offer insight as to how the issue came about?

1/2, 3/4, 5/r each have their own rod. If there is an issue with the rod those gear pairs won't work. For example, I recently had an issue where 1st and 2nd wouldn't engage and it turned out the bolt for the 1/2 rod's shift fork had come out.

You are likely going to have to pull the transmission and rebuild it. You might pull the shifter out inside the car first and just make sure everything looks fine up there but ultimately this sounds more like an internal issue.

No it won't physically go into gear at all. It only let's me put it into 5th and reverse. And it ran and drover perfectly fine and just all of a sudden it stopped going into 1st- 4th so I had to put it in 5th and take off in 5th to get it home and it hasn't gone any where since. I looked at the clutch cylinder and its empty but wouldn't it still physically go into gear like it will for 5th and reverse? Even when its not running?

Have you tried slowly rolling the car with the engine off and trying to put it in gear? If things aren't lining up the transmission won't go into gear. Do you still have issues with the clutch hydraulics or is that resolved?

I haven't tried slowly rolling it and trying to put it into gear and I haven't had time to put fluid in the clutch cylinder yet either. But I also have a 83 with the 12a would the tranny work from that one for my 85 with the 13b? I'll try doing those two things you mentioned. Though and get back to you on that.

Recommend you get the clutch working properly before you consider swapping transmissions between two cars. Not sure about you, but I can get the clutch hydraulics verified in 5 min vs. trying to swap a transmission in about 5 hrs...

Cheapest and easiest things first. A bad clutch master cylinder will show black fluid from the decomposed rubber o-rings inside. That's your first indicator,... Actually, your first indicator is your clutch pedal goes all the way to the floor and won't come back up on its own! Good luck,

If your transmission will not shift into gear with the engine off then you have a transmission problem. The clutch cylinders have nothing to do with the gear engagement when the engine is off. The purpose of the cylinder is to release the clamping pressure from the pressure plate to the clutch disk so that power is not transferred to the transmission during shifting . I recently ran into a problem similar to yours only I had no 3rd or 4th ended up being the sensors were screwed in to far because of a lost sealing washer . So maybe check your sensors .

We had this problem at a race a while back, in our case it would only go into first and second. It was galling and burrs causing the shift rods to stick in the housing around the detent balls. We took it apart and cleaned up the burrs with a file, put it back together and got another 3hrs of track time. Now every new transmission that I add to the pool I take apart, pull the shift rods out, carefully deburr and polish them before putting everything back together.


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