Hey everyone,

I have had my 1974 F250 with a T18 for about two years now. It has been an awesome truck and I drive it all the time.

Now, I am in the middle of a move (of course) and I have been using my truck to haul for the move. Today I am leaving a parking lot, and as I put it in reverse - all of a sudden the shifter goes lose, I am stuck in neutral and cannot get the shifter to grab any more gears.

So, I take the boot off and see the fork that is responsible for reverse is not aligned. Fair enough. I take a long screwdriver, slide it back to neutral and put everything back together. Every other gear shifts fine. I go to try reverse again, same thing! Upon further investigation it looks like when I try to put it in reverse, the reverse lockout spring pushes the shifter upwards and off of the shift fork. (I am not certain it is doing this - just what it looks like to me). Could anyone tell me why this is happening? am I missing something?

Thanks in advance!

 

Incase anyone runs into this issue in the future: I ended up getting it working. Instead of returning the fork to neutral every time the shifter came out, I decided to try putting the fork into reverse with a screwdriver. I started up the truck - but it must not have gone all the way into gear because the truck would not move. I cycled it the same way 4-5 times (between neutral and reverse with the screwdriver). After, I returned it to neutral, stuck the shifter back in and it worked perfectly again.

Still not sure what caused this, but I am thinking something was not meshing right in the trans, or maybe the fork was binding on the rail for some reason. I'll leave the explaining to the guys who know about transmissions, because I know nothing!