The car is an '82 300td. Normally it shifts fine, maybe just a bit firm when cold, never any flare. Today I fired it up -- it had been sitting for a couple days, so it was stone cold. The ambient temperature was about 15 degrees.

So the car is running, and I shifted into reverse. No response whatsoever. Then I shifted into drive and the trans engaged smoothly. I turned around, and reverse started working fine, engaging just as it should, no sign of slip. I pulled up another 50 feet and tried a Y-turn. Reverse was gone again...and so was first.

I let it run a couple minutes to warm up, and suddenly everything was just fine. All gears engaged positively. We drove to grandmother's house, over the river and through the woods. We sat down to a tasty Thanksgiving dinner and returned home. The transmission performed smoothly for the rest of the day.

The fluid (Redline synthetic ATF) is a bit below the full mark. Wha' happen? Any ideas?? TIA

Russ

All I can think of is maybe some of the tranny fluid drained out of the torque converter over those few days, and since it was so cold, it was sluggish to pump back into/fill up the torque converter when you had started the car. After it had enough time to fill it back up everything returned to normal. Thats what I'd guess happened.

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