The tranny on my brother's 98 Z24 is broken. It started acting up yesterday on righthand turns. You could feel the tranny slip just a bit on a righthand turn when you pressed the gas pedal. It's rapidly gotten worse since yesterday. Now, something in the tranny seems to be binding up when he turns a corner. He took the leftside CV shaft out of the tranny to see if it was a CV joint, and it wasn't. When he went to put the shaft back in the tranny, he said that there looked like there was a rod or pin or something of the sort kinda blocking the hole where the inner cv joint pushes into the tranny, he also said that something wasn't letting it pop back into place like it normally would. He took it out to try it, and the tranny is pretty much gone now. It makes a crunching noise when engaging gears, pops, clunks and slips when turning either direction, and it also seems like the wheels aren't turning freely when going around a corner, you can feel one bind up. We're thinking something in the differential came apart yesterday. What's your take on it? He has a 95 base model Cavalier with a 5 speed for parts, will the tranny from the 95 Cavalier swap over to the 98 Z24?
Deffinitely Differential, I just put one in mine.
Call the junkyard and get yourself some machined spider gears out of a SOHC Geo Storm, you can get the entire tranny w/ spiders for $100. They are much stronger than ours, but other than that identical. Go to Alldatadiy.com and pay $25 for their service, it will tell you step by step how to dismantle the tranny and put it back together.
If you're not up to this, Autozone sells a reman tranny for $1000 plus $300 core. But, it has the junk pressed metal spiders in it. The price I got from a local tranny shop to replace my spiders was $800, and I took the tranny out and put it back in myself.
