Hi, first post on this forum, there seems to be a lot of good knowledge here.

I'm doing some engine/transmission work on my 2001 Civic HX with manual transmission. I pulled the engine/trans in block and am fixing some oil leaks with my kids helping out. In parallel, I sent the transmission to the shop for a rebuild due to noise and shifting problems. The transmission came back and it seems to bench-shift well, with one exception - the change lever seems slow in returning to its center position.

To clarify (and reading from the service manual) the "change lever" is the lever driven by the "select lever"...the change lever moves up and down among three vertical positions (relative to the gearbox's orientation as-installed) to index the interlock correctly among the 3 sets of selector forks inside the transmission.

If I manually pull on the select lever (from my understanding this corresponds to moving the car's internal shifter to the 5/Rev "gate") and release it (without selecting a gear), the change lever raises and then snaps back down to the middle position (ie the 3/4 gate) with no problem. This makes sense looking at the mechanism, I expect that in moving the change lever to the the 5/Rev gate I am compressing the select spring that lies just under the shift arm cover, when I release, this spring drives the change lever back to the middle (3/4 gate) position.

However, when I manually push on the select lever and release (again without selecting a gear), the change lever drops to 1/2 but then only lazily/partially snaps back up to the 3/4 position.

My concern is that I was expecting that the change lever would return to the 3/4 gate from 1/2 as aggressively as it does from 5/R. If it does not, I'm concerned about missed shifts once I reinstall the transmission. Specifically I'm concerned about incorrectly shifting from 2 to 1 when I'm intending 2 to 3, due to the lazy return to the center gate. My questions are:

1. What internal mechanism returns the change lever to the 3/4 gate? It looks like the select spring (which is a compression spring) returns it from 5/Rev, but I can't find what returns it from 1/2.
2. Is this even an issue at all? Maybe the return from 1/2 is lazy by design, and the centering springs/mechanism inside the gear shift (inside the cabin) acts through the cable with enough force to return the lever. Admittedly I didn't look at the return from 1/2 to 3/4 on the bench before I sent the transmission out for rebuild.
3. Could it just need lubrication? I'm bench shifting a dry transmission post-rebuild, so this may all go away once oil is loaded into the transmission.

I demonstrated this to my rebuilder and he wasn't concerned, from his recollection it seems to be working correctly. I wanted to get your guys' opinions, maybe someone else has a manual out on a bench and could try this quickly.

Thanks in advance-
Rob

 

Same problem here...

 

I installed the transmission a few days ago and got the car back up and running. The action on the transmission seems fine. I'm not getting any missed shifts. It seems that the centering mechanism on the stick drives the change lever to the 3/4 gate, despite the soft action that I was describing above.

I loaded the engine/trans together into the bay, fastened it to its mounts, and then hooked the select cables up. I went into the cabin and worked through the gears to confirm that the change lever was moving as expected. Cho0se, hope you got a good result on your repair.

Rob