Hi All, My 2002 1.9TDi 130 manual with 140K on the clock has suddenly developed a fault with enaging reverse.

All forward gears engage fine but reverse is kind of locked out. Its not the clutch thats fairly new and works fine.

To get reverse I now need to swing the gear lever across the gate left to right quite hard and quickly and then I can pull it back into reverse.

This is not something that has been getting worse over time literally fine yesterday and broken today

Any idea's it happened when my wife was driving the car could a gear selector have got bent or reached a critical wear point.

Any help much appreatiated

cheers Ben

 

Problem was due to wear in the gear linkage and selector inside the gearbox.

Basically I couldn't move the gearleaver over to the right far enough to get to the slot in the gate to get reverse.

So to cut a long story short I had to remove the gear lever (pull up the gaiter and prize off the clip under neath) remove the ash tray (remove two bolts close it and turn through 45 degrees) then a cover plate two 13mm bolts. You can now see the mechanism, remove 4 torx screws and two 7mm allen bolts and you can pull teh whole thing out.

If you turn it upside down you can see two plastic shoulders that limit movement left and right so for me I had to take drastic action and file a couple of mm's off both sides (did one side first and then couldn't get 1st and second so took it all out again to do the other)

Then reassembly is reverse of disassembly be sure to mark the selector shaft and rod before removing the two allen bolts so you can realign everything on your way back out. I had to try several attempts on the selector shaft before I could get both reverse on one side and first and second on the other.

Make sure you road test the car before refiting everything first time arround I couldn't get 1st and second

Hope this is useful to someone else. A very akward and fiddly job. To get the correct orientation on the selector shaft you may need to tighten this up first before the torx bolts with the assembly cranked over anticlockwise as you cant get a grip on the shaft once assembled as it is right down and hard to get at.

 

Ok I was fixing the symtom last time not the root cause

After another week it was difficult to get first gear again and the gear lever was getting really sloppy.

So I put the car up on ramps dropped the belly pan to take a look at the coupling were the gear change linkage shaft joins the back end of the gearbox.

Sure enough there is a bolt there that holds the two together that had worked very loose just about to drop off. So a quick drop of locktight and screwed it back in nice and tight and hey presto gear change back to normal again.

So why didn't I think of that first time around. Doh. Took about 10 minutes and so much easier than messing around with the gear lever.