Hi all, I have a '01 SLK320 with the 6-speed manual transmission. I've had some minor sloppiness in the shifter for a while but nothing really too bad. Last night I drove the car and was backing it into its spot as normal. As I moved the shifter from reverse to neutral (which involves lifting it over the gate slightly) it seemed to "get loose" and just flop around. The car is now in neutral but won't shift into any gear (feels like the gates have vanished - shifter just flops around loosely with no perceptible engagement of anything). The clutch seems fine - pedal moves in and out like before with no noises or odd behaviours. There were / are no weird noises, "bangs" or anything like that. One minute fine, next minute nothin'

So...

I pulled the shifter off wondering if something had gotten loose between the shifter and the rod or whatever else it connects to under there. Stuff was a little dirty but seemed otherwise okay. I cleaned up what I could and reassembled everything - here's what it looks like now:

The shifter rod (that the knob sits on) connects to a push/pull rod that extends down into the underbelly of the car somewhere (presumably connecting to a ball on the back of the transmission that actuated the gear selection rods / forks internally). I'm wondering if there's a simple way to diagnose this - my next step is (I suppose) to put the car in the air and feel up above the back of the transmission to see if anything feels loose or "off" up there, or see whatever I can see.

Question: Should I be anticipating having to drop the whole transmission out at this point? If so I suppose it's a good time to do the clutch and upgrade it also but I rather avoid it if I can. My wallet and schedule don't really agree with that right now.

Has anyone here encountered anything like this before? Am I on the right track with my line of thinking and is there anything else obvious / simple I could check to minimize digging around? I have a suspicion this might be something simple (it didn't seem to be a "kaboom" failure at all) and I don't want to overreact by dropping transmissions and stuff if I don't really need to, or is that delusional optimism?

TIA!

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