The short story is, I was driving an 88 gxl, everything was working fine. I stopped to make a left turn, put the car in neutral. When it was clear to turn, I attempted to put the car in 1st gear and the shifter would move freely without selecting any gear.

I swapped the transmission and took apart the broken one to see what went wrong. Here are the pictures.

 

More:

 

You are brave sir to do transmission work...

 

Hah. I have no intention of putting it back together. It's going to the metal recyclers from there.

 

so what happend or do you know?

 

I don't know the names of all of the parts.

I found the selector on the end of the rod that the shifter controls broke clean off.
Half of one of the gear movers broke off.
At least one brass gear (synchro?) was broken.

It happened without any noise or feeling while the car was idling in neutral. Or it happened without me noticing shortly before I stopped.

 

If you look closely at the shots (sorry I didn't get more, I had to take my gloves off each time), you can see 3 rods control semicircular pieces that just rest on top of 3 smooth silver cylinders. When you shift into a gear, the selector picks one of those rods and slides the cylinder either forward or backward to overlap with the gear. The brass synchro gear sits between the idle gears and the drive gears.

That's what I could gather from looking at it. This is the first time I've seen the inside of a transmission.

The gear mover that was broken only lost half of itself, the rest was still in place against the cylinder that moves. The broken half was floating around loosely inside.

 

so in other words compleat and total distruction.

 

^^ pretty much.



Destruction in my honda DD. all thats outta the tranny. I pulled 50+ magnet tips of metal shavings. And they were super fine stuff too not large chunks like the 3 pieces in the first pic.
~TDR

 

How many miles were on it? Mine's got over 200k...

 

so you broke the 3rd and 4th gear selector? I edited one of your pics with paint to help you understand what your looking at.


Edit: if thats not enough let me know I can go into more detail

 

awesome. Thanks for labeling the picture.

yes, the broken parts are from 3rd/4th gear selector according to your diagram.

 

transmissions are weird. its like rocket science.... but without the rockets, and science. substitute crazy engineering for term above.

 

Manual transmissions are actually pretty easy to rebuild once you are able to understand what it is you are looking at and how it all works.

Automatics on the other hand, a bit more complicating.

 

Just thought it would be awesome for have a complete rebuild in the archives. Any takers?

I wonder if there are any rebuild videos for our trannies?

 

Yeah, looks like a selector fork and a synchro got eaten...

Broke with no warning?
That's odd.

This is the kinda damage misshifting or speed shifting would do to the trans.
Maybe from previous owners?
The gears looks pretty clean with no damage...


-Ted

 

Manual transmissions arent hard to rebuild, all you gotta know is what it all is, and what it does. Automatic transmissions are a lot more complicated. A lot more parts and processes to change a gear.

 

I would have no problem replacing all the soft parts and my tranny and even doing a rebuild video and a writeup but I don't have the cash or the time right now.

For now I can make a photo of the powerflow for every gear if you guys want to understand more how it works.
it's not rocket science it's physics

all a tranny does is torque multiplication and torque division(and reverse).
ex. big gear driving a small gear means a lot of torque and low speed
a small gear driving a big gear means more speed less torque