Clunking Through The Gears

[Robbie]

Hi Guys,

My VT Berlina seems to have rough gear changes... it seems to me to be coming from the diff more often than not, or atleast the rear of the car... I recently had the transmission serviced and the mechanic thought it had never been done before as it was "full of crap"... it has 125k on the clock... It does feel a little sluggish at times but that does seem to be better since I got it serviced....

I park my car on a hill at night... with my nose down the hill.. When starting of a morning i would put it in reverse and go to take off but I would get no response form the car. The engine would rev but I would just roll down the hill... I would have to stop, wat another 15 seconds and then try again... it would eventually engage the gear but it sucked a lot of gas... it would do it on the flat sometimes but i noticed it on the hill as I had to start from it every morning... The problem seems to be better since the service but it still plays upp occasionally....

And Ideas or suggestions would be great...

Cheers,
Robbie

 

[jules]

the no-drive while on a hill thing as a guess would have been related to the tranny-full-of-crap thing.

the big question is: when you had the tranny serviced, did the problem go away? if not then you may have damaged the tranny. join the club

 

[OSL-060]

Tranny free reving/ not responding on the hill was probably low fluid, when thinking about it, very dangerously low fluid. What happened was all your fluid or what little you had ran up the torque convertor end of the box. The mechanic probably wasnt very desciptive as they often think you dont know sh!t. I would say without trying to worry you that the crap he described is piece's of band. With low fluid, the auto's create massive amounts of friction and burn things that shouldnt be burnt.

Take it to a recommended auto specialist, if the mechanic pulled the pan gasket off and found crap in the filter he really should have just taken the bit's out, topped it up with fluid and sent you to a specialist. But of course he wanted the money for the service.

Keep in mind, that's worse case senario because I have the sh!ts with cars this morning

Jake.

P.S

If your close to the Sunshine Coast I can recommend a transmission guru.

 

[Garth]

reving it's gut's out, yeap, that's the tell tail sign of low oil, drive the car around for about 10 min's, get everything inside all warmed up, you have to do the following in a about 1 min of shutting down the car

turn car of
run around to auto dip stick

pull it out, clean it, shove it back in

count to 10 and look at oil level. if it show's up as low, fill it up. you cant check the auto box when the car has been sitting still.

now, clunking from the rear, my money isnt on yoru diff, but yes the rear of the car, have your uni's looked at on yoru tail shaft, 9 times of out of 10 it's uni joints at rear of shaft.

hope this helps, but still take it to a auto bloke

 

[Robbie]

Jake,

The guy I went to was a pretty close friend... He did say to me that if I had any more problems he has someone he can recommend... a transmission place...

prior to having this service I took it back to my place of purchase, a toyota dealer and they claimed the transmission was dry and that they serviced it.... I think they just topped it up with fluid and sent me on my merry way but it didn't fix anything... After the full service I THINK the problem went away... i haven't noticed it lately that I can recall....

garth, What can be done about uni joints? replace them? or "fix" them??

What sort of money are they worth??

Cheers,
Robbie

 

[Garth]

hey, uni's are a non serviable unit, you can fix uni joints at all, the only thing to do is replace them. your looking around the $30-60 mark each uni, it's about 30 for the part, and the rest is labour, my recomendation is replace all of them, even though the front one may be fine, you just never know do ya. a good test is to put the car in neutral, make sure handbrake is on of course, and chock the wheels, get under it and put both hands on the driveshaft(tailshaft) and try to wiggle it in dirrection of travel, if it moves at all, the uni's are buggered.


cheers
garth