This morning after dropping my girlfriend off at work, I go to get on the highway to head to my fathers restaurant. As I'm getting on the on-ramp, people are coming, so I figure they'll either move over because nobodies in the left lane, or slow down or speed up to hopefully let me in.
They don't.
So I slow down a lot on the on ramp. I look to my left to see if the people have passed me yet, and I see nobody there, so I check my blind spot and realize the woman in the SUV hit the brakes hard to slow down even more than I have. At this point I take the opportunity to go because she's already stopped, and I throw it in second and step on it. I bring it up pretty high and slam it into third. Only I hear a popping noise, and now I've got no third. I go to put it into neutral and let off the clutch and my car revs right up, I'm actually not even sure if I slammed the limiter (it'd be the first time I've ever done that with this car, and I really hope and think that I didn't), but when I realized I wasn't in neutral, I slammed the clutch back in, and rolled to the side of the road with my hazards on.
I put the car into what is usually neutral, and slowly let off the clutch and I notice my RPM's start to drop. At this point I put my clutch back in, and just try to go through the gears. It appears to me at the time that my gearbox is completely @!#$ up, so I take off my boot and have a look into it. I don't see anything extremely out of the ordinary, and I can't get into there because I don't carry sockets and socket wrenches with me normally (at least not the ones I need).
I manage to get it into what I figure is second (I've got no first, third, or fifth gears), and I get to ride the @!#$ out of my clutch to get back onto the highway. As I hit about 25 MPH, I realize that this isn't going to work, and so I try to find another gear (at the time I had no idea what was going on with my transmission), and I seem to find what I think is 4th. So I put it in fourth, throw my hazards on, and I get to drive home doing 45-50 MPH at 3,000 RPM.
It's a 30 mile drive.
Once I get off the ramp, there's a light, which happens to be green, but the person turning right decides to stop anyway and check for traffic. By the time they decide it's okay to go, the light has turned red and cars ARE coming, so I have to come to a stop as well. I get to ride my clutch and hear my engine cry again. I hit a second set of lights. Then a third... on a hill.
At this point I've only got two stop signs between myself and my house, so I coast through doing about 10 MPH making sure there are no cars or cops. I finally get home and get to rip out my center console to find that my fore-aft shift cable was almost completely pulled out. As it turns out, my entire center of movement was moved towards the front of the car, so where my 1-3-5th gears usually were, was where neutral was, and where neutral usually was, was where fourth is.
Thank God I installed the shifter just a month ago and the cables still had the markings on them so I could put it back into place. If this had happened before my short shifter install, I don't think I would have figured out what was wrong or how to fix it, and I would have had to pay somebody to do a simple job.
I also thought I broke the clips, so I was happy that it just slid out.
What I think happened was when I went to put it into third obviously in an extremely overzealous manner, I either missed third and hit between first and third, and then slammed it so hard that it just pulled out the cable, or I hit third and kept pushing until it pulled it out. I haven't really shifted my car hard since the install, so I probably pushed it even after I hit third, not realizing I was already in.
Overall it was a scary experience, and I'm glad it's all fixed. I'd like to end this with a question to bring at least SOME value to this post.
The little cube that holds the shift cables in seems to be holding fine now, but is it possible I stripped the groves of either the cable, or the cube? If so, how ridiculously expensive is that piece (hopefully not the cable) from GM? If worse comes to worse, I could junkyard hop I suppose. I just don't want that to happen again.
Thanks for reading, and any responses.
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