Symptoms of worn gear select cables????

[cavedweller]

Hi, I am new to this site having been lurking around a while. I have been driving Toyota's for years(what else is there). I have owned my 99 Camry for 11 years now, without an ounce of trouble(310,000 kms) and have an 04 Hilux as a work ute. A mate of mine has asked me to look at his 99 Rav, it's having trouble selecting gears, what started out as a bit of trouble getting reverse(it would go into the reverse gate, but not select, and you could let the clutch out and there would be nothing there, no grinding,crunching etc) has now progressed to not being able to select 2nd, 4th or reverse at all. He took the vehicle back to the dealer as we suspected a cable issue, he was told by the head mechanic it was a problem in the box itself. Has anyone experienced a similar issue? We'd rather find out whether toyota were on the mark before we pull the engine/box out of the car to find it was a cable issue all along. The new cables are nearly $1000, and the gearbox repair cost, well who knows. Thanks in advance.

[Sunsett]

I read on another threat how they place a pencil eraser with a notch cut out of it just on top of the tunnel to take up the slack. See whether you can find that thread, I think it is the same one as this forum but the world wide one. Hope that makes sense.

[cavedweller]

Hi Sunsett, Thanks for your reply. We have fixed the problem, it ended up being the cables. The outer plastic coating has come off the gear selector cables behind the engine where it was hard to see. It seems this allows water to penetrate the outer cable wires, which seems to cause them to break down, then once rusty, the strands seem to come apart, then the inner cable binds and kinks. That it why it was able to select the forward facing gears as pushing the gearstick forward, actually pulls the cable, the rearward shift tries to push the cable and as the strands of the outer cable has come apart, it just kinks up the inner. The cables cost $936 from Toyota. We took the old cables to a cable remanufacturer and he informed us he was unable to repair Rav4 cables as the cable ends, once removed from the original cable are not reusable. Condition of secondhand cables were not a lot better than the ones we had as the outer plastic coating had began falling off. So, all in all a very expensive thing to fix, but still cheaper than the fault in the gearbox Toyota had diagnosed. So anyone else with the same hard to select gears problem, I strongly recommend if using second hand cables, make sure the black outer plastic coating is in good condition or else they will not last long in the car and you will be looking for more. The wreckers tell me they sell a lot of them, so they'll probably end up very hard to find.

[Sunsett]

I had a similar problem with my boat. Not only do I own a boat I own a Toyota I wonder what I do with my spare cash. Anyway the replacement cost was hundreds and the repair job was as low as $20 from memory.

Glad you have it fixed.