Topic: Cloud Honda

[mojikita]

This post looks like a similar situation. While he doesn't post how it was resolved, post #16 makes sense. Both cases involve suspect fluid. Unfortunately, the diagrams don't show you much. It would also make sense that it's stuck in 5th, both from what you've noted and this post.

https://honda-tech.com/forums/honda-civic-del-sol-1992-2000-1/tranny-stuck-gear-3001985/

[seat safety switch]

Oof. Yeah, the PO mentioned that he had done a "transmission flush" a while ago, so who knows what kind of stuff is floating around in there (if anything).

Good find, thanks. I'm going to ask a real mechanic to join me tomorrow when I take a whack at it and see if there's anything obvious I've missed.

[seat safety switch]

I had a real mechanic join me today. We checked the drain plug first, and found only a trickle of suspiciously bronze-y looking gear oil. After topping it up with crap oil we had lying around the shop, no obvious change was noticed in function.

However, even after filling it with ~3L of gear oil and popping the drain plug again, there was still only a trickle. Not sure where all this gear oil is going - my best guess is that there is some large cavity in the trans that can't fully drain because the front end is up on stands.

I noticed if I let out the clutch in "neutral," allowing the front wheels to spin to about 31km/h, and then jump on the gas to 60km/h and shift really fast and precisely, I could pop the car into 6th gear, where it would happily continue to do what it was doing instead of stalling hard like it did in any other gear. So it's stuck in 6th, and it seems the reverse-lockout solenoid and the lockout arm have somehow caused the problem.

Things we ruled out:

• Shift cables binding - I pulled the pins and removed the cables. The linkage on top of the trans still does not allow shifting into neutral, even if it "says" it is in neutral.
• Unplugging the reverse lockout solenoid - this is probably "active low" because it has to work when the car is off, so no difference was observed here

Unbolting the reverse lockout solenoid looks extremely difficult, since there's a very tiny gap where a socket could fit. I'm not sure how you're supposed to do it with the trans in the car. It does seem to work.

I considered again removing the shift turret and peering down into the trans, but I suspect not much would have been gained and access was at best quite poor.

It was decided it's time for the trans to come out.

We ended up driving to Airdrie, picking up a 36mm socket for the axle and then using the last hour of free time to pop the passenger side axle and intermediate shaft out of the trans. It wasn't too bad, as expected the worst part was removing the ball joint. I was surprised how little is different from my Civic.

Next step is to come back to it, some time this week, and pop out the driver-side axle and prepare the rest of the trans to exit the car so we can test it on the bench. I'm not sure exactly how we're going to get it out of here since the overengineered, very thick k-frame seems to be in the way of most obvious methods of egress, and I really don't want to drop the engine and trans together... although we're already most of the way there by the time we start unbolting engine mounts.

[seat safety switch]

Placed a deposit for another transmission (picking up Tuesday), pulled the whole front end off the car and prepared it for the scary part where we let everything hang off an engine support beam. It looks like Honda has an actual factory part that is supposed to help out with this, so I might call the dealer and see if I can source a tool to reduce the level of sketch that I am about to encounter.

I yanked the radiator to protect it, which involved way too much disassembly. The FSM does not recommend removing the radiator but I was like, I'm gonna pull a Cam if I don't.



I had to yank the bumper cover anyway in order to fix the damage and replace the grille with RockAuto parts. Also, notice the cracked horn.

Found out the front driver side fender was way worse than we originally thought, so while I was at the yard I also picked up a pearl white driver side fender. We'll spraypaint that ourselves and maybe it will even come out okay? Who knows.

The real journey today was the experience of discovering what one of the POs did to the foglights. I first removed the battery tray in order to get a little more room to swing wrenches:



Then there was a weird amount of homemade harnesses going everywhere underneath it. So we followed one of them to its terminus, a pair of rusty pins that's just sitting in a female connector instead of, you know, being in a male connector. I cut this out immediately.



As we were pulling it out, we found this relay and (thankfully) a little fuse holder...



The other end of this harness seemed to plug into a bunch of wiring that eventually reached the loose passenger side foglight. What the hell? An hour of ziptie cutting and wiring harness removal followed, and sure enough, the driver side also had loose pins going into a female connector, except at least this time they wrapped them in electrical tape.



Oh, it's Chinese HID fogs. Glad I got these out before they burned the car down.



Bye, garbage!

[canehdianJ]

I still think the gearbox is one of the best I've driven. Only one better is Jory's S2k. I might actually have some shifter bushings in a box if you want them.

I owned a 2006 RSX Type S for 2 years.  It had 12000$ of warranty work done on the transmission. and it was rebuilt twice.

It broke 2nd gear and 3rd gear

and to this day is the most un-reliable car I ever owned.  The Subaru even with the engine out repair was still more reliable then the piece of itshay transmission in my Acura.

[jellynuts]

I owned a 2006 RSX Type S for 2 years.  It had 12000$ of warranty work done on the transmission. and it was rebuilt twice.

It broke 2nd gear and 3rd gear

and to this day is the most un-reliable car I ever owned.  The Subaru even with the engine out repair was still more reliable then the piece of itshay transmission in my Acura.

Yeah, or maybe go easy on the hero shifting and keeping the motor at redline. 

[seat safety switch]

Yeah, or maybe go easy on the hero shifting and keeping the motor at redline.

Once I get the new trans into this thing I'm going to beat this car like a C-student at a dragon boat race.

[ultimatt]

If they didn't want you to shift there they would have made the redline lower.

[Rathburn]

Yeah, or maybe go easy on the hero shifting and keeping the motor at redline.

It's like you've never driven a Honda before.

[seat safety switch]

I certainly plan on beating this car like a rented mule once it's fixed. It has to make up for all the downtime now to get its cost-per-mile back into "beater" category.

Last night, popped over after work to do some more wronching.



Never had an exhaust spring bolt come off first time before.



No Honda dealership in town knew how to look up the special part number for hanging the engine safely by its head, so instead we're using this terrifying ghetto chain setup.



It's looped around the massive combination transmission-and-engine-mount block ear, which is thicker than a Subaru engine block on its own.



When I eventually break something off the top of the head, here's probably why it happened. Prepare your laughter.



All the subframe bolts are broken loose, and we're about to start sketchily wiggling the subframe down just enough to get the trans broken off and removed. New transmission gets picked up today or tomorrow, and other parts are on the way from RockAuto.

As we reinstall literally everything into this uckfaying car, we'll be replacing the motor mounts and also removing the miles of melted and corroded sub wiring left from a previous-previous owner.

[Rathburn]

RIP seatsafetyswitch.
Crushed to death by a janky engine hoist/support rigged up to a 15 year old Honda.

[darthekai]

It's how he would have wanted it.

[ultimatt]

Dibs on the... (checks list of sss' current fleet) uh.... Saab?

[toytech]

You would still be alive if you had a 2 post hoist , you leave the top engine mount on, then support the engine from below with a stand . You can drop the subframe around the stand and bingo trans pops right out and hardly anyone is killed . Honda dose have a huge contraption to hold the engine up on some of their cars , looks just like you rigged up but with less wood .

[seat safety switch]

You would still be alive if you had a 2 post hoist , you leave the top engine mount on, then support the engine from below with a stand . You can drop the subframe around the stand and bingo trans pops right out and hardly anyone is killed . Honda dose have a huge contraption to hold the engine up on some of their cars , looks just like you rigged up but with less wood .

We've got a 2-post as well, but it's also occupied with a dead car. We'll see what we can do with a set of high-lift stands with the thing much closer to the ground...

[toytech]

Its a honda manual trans , i mean how heavy can it really be? You can answer the age old question of "Do you even lift bro?" by bench pressing the trans back in if you really have too.

[seat safety switch]

Oh, I'm not worried about the trans. More worried about the very heavy K24 attached to the trans.

New trans gets picked up tomorrow.

[RedndWhite]

Its a honda manual trans , i mean how heavy can it really be? You can answer the age old question of "Do you even lift bro?" by bench pressing the trans back in if you really have too.

1) They're pretty heavy and damn awkward to waddle around with a fwd 6 speed transmission
2) A feather could crush SSS if he's not careful

[seat safety switch]

That's why I'm also short, so anyone else under the car will get crushed before it reaches me, and I can get away.

[seat safety switch]

Despite what my haters in the so-called liberal so-called media have said, I did not get crushed under the transmission last night. In fact, the transmission has been happily removed from the car and placed in the corner, where it belongs.

Our first indication that the old trans may be el-uckyfay was this tremendously large chunk of metal floating around in the clutch inspection cover, stuck under a tooth of the flywheel.



The mating surface and metal around the transmission was super thin and cracked as well, which makes me think something else had let go inside the bellhousing before. Let's keep going.


I'm not entirely sure where this piece comes from. It looks almost like it's multiple layers, one of the layers is reddish iridescent. Probably important.



Our transmission jack didn't go high enough, so we briefly considered putting it on this workhorse to give it some extra height. Then, I remembered that we can lower the lift as well as raise it.

Things were not going well at this point.



At last, after what seemed like unbolting every single fastener in the entire car, the transmission is freed.



Oh boy. That's not, that's not good.



Clutch fork seems unhappy.





So that's where all my gear oil went.



At least the shrapnel-destroyed pressure plate still looks like it's in good shape. Too bad it's going in the trash.



Those bolts and that case sealant look suspiciously new...

Call me paranoid but it sure looks like the previous owner had some dramatic failure with this trans, towed it to a mechanic who opened the case just enough to ghetto-fix it on the car, and then told him to immediately sell it to some sucker. Hi, I'm that sucker.

Here is the "new" transmission, fresh from the wrecker (a specialty Civic and Accord shop not even ten minutes from the ranch). Despite its generally ugly appearance, the car it came out of had many fewer miles and was in nicer shape than ours.  The yard operator was going to fix up and DD it. Oh well.





We also ganked a fender off said car, which will get stripped and ghetto repainted because the driver-side fender this came with was in fact too thin to save.

[Asstuna]

I did a gearbox replacement in the Ferd.
What a itshay of a job. I even had some helping hands.

[Rathburn]

I look forward to the tranny tear-down on the old one, so we can hopefully see what went wrong in there.

[seat safety switch]

I look forward to the tranny tear-down on the old one, so we can hopefully see what went wrong in there.

At this point there's enough interest that I should consider shopping it to HBO as a miniseries.

I have no idea what could have made that hole, and I dunno if that chunk I found in the clutch inspection cover could have done that much damage to the case. I guess it's aluminum, so it's probably softer than whatever broke off?

[seat safety switch]

Thing make go in car now.

First: the old clutch.




Looks a bit glazed but not too bad. Exedy stage 1 "organic." Bidding starts at $25.

Pressure plate:



Flywheel:


No real ridges on this, a bit of gunk but not bad.

Put a new clutch, flywheel, pilot bearing, PP, TOB, etc into the car. But our pilot bearing puller didn't fit.



This one also didn't fit so we used the business end and ghetto-rigged it to work on the end of a slide hammer. Then it fit. It fit real nice. POP!

Off to the glorious new Princess Auto in the North, whose parking lot is already covered in oil from leaky cars despite having only been open ten days. These are my people.



That's better.

New trans mount on. The front one had so much overspray on the studs that, while trying to clean them off with a nut, the stud just snapped off. Thanks Westar. Off to the bolt bin we go...



Upper trans mount also replaced. This kept pushing the trans assembly around until we couldn't line up the bottom one. Finally we just unbolted it, pry-barred the trans around and made it fit.



New front and rear motor mounts. We'll do the passenger one when the car's back together.



Subframe goes up...





One of the exhaust bolts snapped off while we were removing it, so we drilled it out and got lucky that it still threaded. By this point my phone was now having weird seizures on autofocus every time the flash went off.



Front and rear trans mounts finally connected.



Subframe go up, sketchy jacking setup go down.



Remind me to plug in the O2 sensor. We need to find where I put the bracket for it.



Our buddy Tom, a pro mechanic, came out and was an enormous help. We could not have done it without him. Tom is going on the rally and bringing the same Mustang from last year because his project, a ghetto-turbocharged E12 BMW, ate up the entire CIS-E wiring harness during early testing.

[Rathburn]

At this point there's enough interest that I should consider shopping it to HBO as a miniseries.

Unless you've got loads of titties, dragons, or synths, I think you'll have better luck with Netflix.