Laureen & I drove the 940T out to the west coast for Christmas. It seems that ever single time I drive a 940 out to the coast I have to have some sort of breakdown. This time, however, it looked as though the curse was broken. We had finished our holiday in Whistler and were heading out of the lower mainland and still hadn't had a problem with the car. This was a couple days before new years.
We diverted off the #1 to go into Langley to drop in on some friends for a couple hours and were planning to head out for Kelowna later on in the afternoon. We were driving down 200th Street (the main drag through Langley) when we got stopped at a light. We started up again when it went green and went about another block and all of a sudden just as I started to shift into a higher gear I found I could no longer get the car to go into gear. In fact, it felt as though the manual gearshift lever had become detached from the remote shifter rod so there was no way to get the car into any gear. I was stuck in neutral.
When there was a break in the traffic Laureen and I managed to push the car backwards about half a block down 200th (slightly downhill) and then turned it across a couple lanes and onto a very small (low traffic) sidestreet where I parked it up against the curb. Man I was PISSED off !
Everything was extremely wet and slushy because the heaps of snow they had there was melting so I did not want to have to get under the car to fix anything. Being the holiday season I knew there was little chance of finding a place that was open to work on it so I knew it was up to me to fix the problem. Good thing I packed my toolbox. After pulling the cover plate off the shifter console I could see that the pin thingy that goes through the shifter and attaches it to the actuator rod had fallen out. I guess the little setscrew that was supposed to hold it in place either shook loose or rusted away. I put all that together so I guess if anyone was at fault, it was me.
I looked out on the road and managed to find the pin but I didn't have a spare set-screw but even if I did have one or could buy one there was no way to screw it in without jacking the car up and getting under it (which I did NOT want to do). After looking at it a bit I got the idea that maybe I could just use a bolt & nut in place of the connector pin. If it would work I could do it all from inside the car so that looked like my best option. Actually, it was pretty much my only option.
So I guessed at the size of bolt I would need and walked a couple blocks back to a Lordco that we had just passed a few minutes earlier. I bought a range of bolts and nuts in sizes and lengths that I thought might fit. I also bought some heavy-duty Loctite to keep the nut from shaking loose off of the bolt. It turned out that one of the bolts I bought was the perfect size and length and with a bit of fiddling (Laureen's small hands came in handy here) we managed to get the thing bolted back together and we were on our way again fairly quickly.
In retrospect we got DAMN lucky. The only better place that thing could've come apart would've been a couple blocks earlier just before we passed the Lordco so I could've coasted into their parking lot. Later that day (actually that night) we drove through a huge snow storm on the Coquihalla (just awful conditions; tons of snow, terrible visibility, high winds, etc.) and I couldn't help but think of what a friggin' awful disaster it would've been if the thing had of let go somewhere on the Coquihalla in that god-awful snowstorm and not when and where it did. So even though we were unlucky enough to have another breakdown on a trip to the coast I came away feeling very blessed and dead lucky.
The really ironic thing is that with that bolt in there the gearshift seems much tighter and the car shifts waaay better than it ever did.
That tranny was always a bit hard to shift and was difficult to get into first right from neutral right from the get-go after I did the AW71 - M46 conversion on that car. I just figured it was because the transmission was a bit worn and/or maybe because I had installed one of Dale & Matt's short throw shifters. Apparently not. Now it shifts really nicely.
Anyways, I've decided to just leave that bolt in there and not put it back to "stock. With all the "Permanent" Loc-tite I put on that bolt I figure that nut is never going to come loose on it's own. The gearshift seems much tighter and it shifts way nicer than it did when it was "stock" so why bother messing with it ? I can't see any reason to...
