Hey all,

I've got an '83 240D manual trans that's been running perfectly for the past year until yesterday when it became really hard to shift gears. When the shifter is in neutral position it is hard to move back and forth, and as a result difficult to get it into 1st and 2nd. Once in gear it's fine, but it is almost undrivable. Shift bushings are new. Could this be worn out gear linkage? Thanks in advance.

Yeah I had this exact problem on my 82 240d. The unit construction transmissions have shifter arms on the transmission with a hollow shaft. Down the hollow shaft is a hex head bolt inside the tube.

These get loose and the shift linkage tries to put the trans into two gears at the same time since one lever isn’t quite out of gear because it slips and you move another lever to get it into the next gear. It was fifteen years ago but I do recall it being a 1-2 problem.

To see the bolt heads you need a mirror. They’re deep down the shafts. I forgot what size hex key I used. 8mm? The fun part of the story was I bought my 240d with a “bad trans” and got a steep discount. It took me a couple,of weeks to figure out the shifter arm bolts were lose. I remember apologizing to my wife that I’d bought a lemon car and now I had to fix its trans a month after bringing it home.

Hope it’s that. The other time my car wouldn’t shift was a collapsed throwout bearing. It was pretty wild. The clutch lasted longer than the throwout bearing. Tells you a lot about how forgiving a 240d is for stalling…you don’t need to slip the clutch much to get her going.

__________________
79 300TD “Old Smokey” AKA “The Mistake” (SOLD)
82 240D stick shift 335k miles (SOLD)
82 300SD 300k miles
85 300D Turbodiesel 170k miles
97 C280 147k miles

Found a photo online. See the 3 shift control shafts on the side of the trans? They’re hollow and there’s a hex bolt down that tube. Check to see if the bolts are tight. That fixed my shift issue. I drove the car another 10 years 100k after that.

__________________
79 300TD “Old Smokey” AKA “The Mistake” (SOLD)
82 240D stick shift 335k miles (SOLD)
82 300SD 300k miles
85 300D Turbodiesel 170k miles
97 C280 147k miles

Thanks for the in depth response. I'll take a look in the morning and report back. How difficult were these to access?

Easy. Just slip the long end of a standard L shaped hex key down the tube and tighten. There is enough room between the tunnel and trans. I may have slipped a piece of copper plumbing pipe over the end of the hex key for some extra leverage.

Cannot recall it all because it was 2004. The hard part was knowing they’re in there and that they can mess up shifting. I recall the line of thinking was they didn’t have a pinch bolt style clamp like the older ones and I wondered how they were secured.

Then I took a peek down there with a mirror. Then I slipped a hex key in and was alarmed to feel it turn a 1/4 turn before it tightened. It took me about three weeks after buying the car to find the issue. It only took five minutes to fix the “bad trans”. It was quite loose when I eventually tightened it.

The car shifter locked up during the test drive and the seller hesitatingly admitted there was a potential transmission problem when I cross examined him. I test drove the car alone and I was literally stuck on the side of the road with my arm up under the car pulling the links back and forth trying to un jam it. It’s a great memory of my first fix on a w123.

When I got back he tried to deny it at first but he finally admitted it had been a problem. I kept in touch will the guy for a few months for other business reasons and he got really curious about how I fixed the problem. Apparently it had been getting worse for him and finally he decided to dump the car before it got so bad he couldn’t sell it. He was visibly upset when I told him how I fixed it.

Let us know what you find.

__________________
79 300TD “Old Smokey” AKA “The Mistake” (SOLD)
82 240D stick shift 335k miles (SOLD)
82 300SD 300k miles
85 300D Turbodiesel 170k miles
97 C280 147k miles

Very interesting... I've rebuilt my shifter and still on occasion I experience a little hesitation shifting into reverse.

Given the state of many of the loose bolts I've found in the engine bay, these are a prime suspect.

__________________
1981 240D 4sp manual. Ivory White.

Thanks for the tips. Tried this earlier and everything was super tight. Unfortunately she's stuck in first or second and I cannot for the life of me get it out of gear either. Gonna have my indie take a look since I need the car roadworthy ASAP. I'll report back once he finds out what's wrong. Fingers crossed. Thanks again for the pointers.

Oh no. Sorry it wasn’t easy.

__________________
79 300TD “Old Smokey” AKA “The Mistake” (SOLD)
82 240D stick shift 335k miles (SOLD)
82 300SD 300k miles
85 300D Turbodiesel 170k miles
97 C280 147k miles

Transmission may be bound up because another shift arm (3-4 or reverse) is not in neutral. For the transmission to shift, all the arms have to be straight up or straight down (depending if it is the iron or aluminum box transmission)

__________________
CC: NSA

All things are burning, know this and be released.

82 Benz 240 D, Kuan Yin
12 Ford Escape 4wd

You're four times

It's hard to

more likely to

concentrate on

have an accident

two things

when you're on

at the same time.

a cell phone.

www.kiva.org It's not like there's anything wrong with feeling good, is there?

So for the transmission in the picture above, you can see that it is in neutral. You can only have one gear selected at a time. Put the arms like that, and you should be able to move one arm at a time forward or back. You'll feel it click into the neutral position, so there's a definate feeling as you go forward or back with the arm.

__________________
CC: NSA

All things are burning, know this and be released.

82 Benz 240 D, Kuan Yin
12 Ford Escape 4wd

You're four times

It's hard to

more likely to

concentrate on

have an accident

two things

when you're on

at the same time.

a cell phone.

www.kiva.org It's not like there's anything wrong with feeling good, is there?

Yeah, that in essence was what was wrong with mine. Because one arm was loose, it was not getting it out of one gear before moving on to the next.

As I think about it, misadjustment of the control bars can do this too. Maybe a malfunction in the shifter controls under the stick?

There is of course the possibility of some kind of contamination inside the trans jamming up the shift forks. This will be bad on this unit because it’ll require disassembly to sort out.

From your description of levers all having to be vertical I can kind of remember how I found my problem. I disconnected all the control bars at the bushings and individually worked all the levers back and forth. I found one was loose and not always catching.

__________________
79 300TD “Old Smokey” AKA “The Mistake” (SOLD)
82 240D stick shift 335k miles (SOLD)
82 300SD 300k miles
85 300D Turbodiesel 170k miles
97 C280 147k miles

Yup. I've had this problem on W123 and W201 cars, just a lot less space on the 201 ;-).

To go thru it all and make it nice is a world of difference.
1- Pull linkages noting locations.
2- Pull shifter, clean, lube, press new bushings in.
3. Line up the 3 holes in the levers on the shifter, put a 16d nail thru to keep them lined up.
4. Press new bushings into the arms on the transmission, tighten if loose. Put them straight up or straight down, depending. You should feel each one click into the center position. It's tempting to remove and put locktite on the capscrew but don't, it's hard to get back in.
5. Put the shifter back in, adjust the length of the linkages if you need to, pull the nail out, clip the linkages in.

It should work great now unless there's problems inside the transmission.

__________________
CC: NSA

All things are burning, know this and be released.

82 Benz 240 D, Kuan Yin
12 Ford Escape 4wd

You're four times

It's hard to

more likely to

concentrate on

have an accident

two things

when you're on

at the same time.

a cell phone.

www.kiva.org It's not like there's anything wrong with feeling good, is there?

Could this possibly be a clutch problem? Brake fluid reservoir full, both chambers? No dampness under the carpet up between the brake and clutch pedals?

__________________


1985 Euro 240D 5 spd 140K
1979 240D 5 spd, 40K on engine rebuild
1994 Dodge/Cummins, 5 spd, 121K
1964 Allice Chalmers D15 tractor
2014 Kubota L3800 tractor
1964 VW bug

"Lifes too short to drive a boring car"

Possibly. As I said above, the other time my car had shifting problems was when my throwout bearing self destructed. It didn’t want to go into gear. You could put it into gear with the engine off but clutching it wouldn’t get it out of gear (wheels were up when I tried this).

__________________
79 300TD “Old Smokey” AKA “The Mistake” (SOLD)
82 240D stick shift 335k miles (SOLD)
82 300SD 300k miles
85 300D Turbodiesel 170k miles
97 C280 147k miles