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Broken M66 Shifter Cable Repair - with Shortcut Tips

4K views 1 reply 2 participants last post by  tmtalpey 
#1 · (Edited)
Hello SwedeSpeed comrades,

I recently had a failure of my V50 T5 6MT AWD gear change cable. This is the fore/aft cable, not the cross-gate cable (left/right).

Failure Experience:
- Went for 4-5 upshift (moderately aggressive)
- Gear change did not complete. Felt like I got Neutral instead.
- Shifter appeared to be in 5th, definitely just Neutral though!
- Attempted to shift back into 4th. This was successful.
- Any further shifting produced no changes. Pushing forward just felt like air. Moving side-to-side was impossible. I was stuck in 4th at this point.

With hindsight: The failure of the gear change cable was such that "pulling" motion would still mostly work (like pulling down into 4th), but "pushing motion" would just separate the cable and not effectively do anything. So once into 4th, I could not push it back into Neutral at all. As such, I couldn't get the shifter to move left or right no matter how far I pushed the stick forward.

I had to drive it to the shop without shifting. Taking off from a stop proved impossible in 4th, so I stopped on the roadside and *manually* shifted my manual car into 3rd gear, by directly manipulating the shifter linkage under the hood (on top of the transmission). This allowed me to drive the remaining 10 miles to the shop where the car would sit until my shiny new shifter cable arrived some days later (Thanks, FCP Euro!).

The repair:



The cables are basically together as one unit. The stuff under the hood was pretty standard. My major concern was how much of the interior I would have to gut in order to get this dual cable apparatus snaked out of the car and then back into place. Dashboard? HVAC? Seats? Let's find out.

I started by popping out the shifter boot and the little tray behind the waterfall to see what's up.


Stuff was visible, but I could tell I would need some more room, so I popped off the waterfall next.


From here, it looks possible to fish things out - but they didn't leave quite enough clearance.


I am definitely not excited about pulling any more of my interior apart - so here is the "shortcut" part:


So now I got the shifter end looking good, lets see where the grommet/boot bolts up - and let's hope it's not behind the A/C evaporator or Heater Core of something ridiculous.
So I pulled back the carpet on the passenger's side, next to the glove box.


Thank goodness, it's right there.


For the left nut, I can get to it from the other side, right next to the gas pedal:


Once those nuts are removed, the last part is the bracket where the cables are held to the body. Turns out this is the thing caused the entire problem:


Zoom in and enhance (they are already popped out of the bracket in this picture). Gross:


Now that everything is disconnected, just a matter of GRATUITOUS AMOUNTS OF YANKING AND JANGLING to get the thing pulled out. Yes, it pulls out straight, pretty much into the back seat.


Once I got this far, I was pretty sure this was going to work out ok:


Success:


Enhance Carnage:


Left: Old and Busted (mfg date 2005)
Right: New Hotness (mfg date 2017)






Results: My Shifty Boi is back on the road. An unexpected benefit: It has never shifted this nice. So smooth and effortless! I can really feel the nice detents of the shifts. It speeds up the shifts enough that I almost have to re-learn how to drive it. Wish I had done this earlier, but then again - it was kind of an annoying job to do.

Shortcut Analysis: I think the shortcut of trimming the plastic was plenty to get things done. Moving more dashboard pieces would have taken longer. The difficult part of feeding the cables was mostly due to the HVAC box being close to the cable path, so it would not have helped that part. In reality, fishing the old cable out seemed more difficult than pushing the new one through. Maybe because the damaged part was snagging on stuff. Anyway, hope this might be useful to somebody.
 
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