Difficult To Get Into Gear

[chrisstyles]

Had my 12 plate Avensis in for 20000 mile service on Monday. Today (Wednesday) it is difficult to engage 2nd or 4th gear occasionally. Seems to be when moving from the R/1/2 to the 3/4/5/6 side of the box.

Garage seem to think it is the cables and a coincidence but are replacing them under warranty.

In addition if I am cruising on the motorway and engage 2nd (clutch down all the time) you have to push to engage it and you can feel vibration / rubbing. Is this normal? I had not tried before the problem.

Is this really likely to be the cables or the box and does any part of the service touch them?

Anyone with any ideas?

[gazza1286]

The cables and box don't form part of a service. The cables are required to select a gear however once the gear is selected that's it. So worn cables will not have any impact on how a selected gear performs.

One cable relates the the 'left-right' movement of the gear lever. The other governs the 'forward-backward' movement. Sounds like one of the cables is at fault. The normal place to wear (after very high mileage) is the bushing at the gearbox end of the cable. Toyota in their infinite wisdom don't seem to sell this 50p bushing and only supply the entire cable.

[chrisstyles]

Well its been in and had the cables replaced. Now when deselecting 1st or 2nd the leaver does not slide back to nutural it needs to be manually put back. 3rd to 6th it slides in and back out again no problem. In nutural if you move the lever to the left it slowly comes back to center. Move it to the right and it slides / springs back.

Any ideas? Seems the garage are ordering quite a number of additional parts now, bearing in mind the milage is only 15.5k. I am assuming the springy bit is more than likely to be gear lever end rather than gearbox, would that be right?

[Druid Boy]

Still sounds cable related to me - mainly because the cables have been played with and now you have a new problem. Poorly running cables could delay the action of the lever on return - but I'm doing 'internet guessing' here.

It doesn't really matter as the garage should be sorting this out for you.