Pinto Car Club of America

We just started to run 4 speeds on our pintos. I was wondering why is it the reverse gears have a consistency to fail?
Some of the 4 speeds do it right off the bat and some dont do it at all.
Anyone have any ideas?

Have you opened any of the broken trannies to see where they failed??

  My first instinct would be a lubrication problem, Id say whoever designed the tranny wasnt expecting people to be in reverse most of the time, like you are.  maybe a couple well placed oil throwers that would throw more oil on the problem area.  Or a "windage tray" sort of thing that concentrates the oil running back down from the top of the case to allow the oil dripping back down to drip on the problem area instead of running down the sides of the case.  Dunno.

  Or it could just be inferior bushings.( bushings not big or bulky enough to handle the strain of 20 mph to 0 mph in a split second.)

  Open up a couple of your broken ones and look around see what you find.

Just a thought,
but maybe it has something to do with the idea that all the forward gears are usually rotating in the same direction, so when a shift is made there is less damage done if the gears aren't quite syncronized when shifting, as compared to what can happen to the gear teeth if the car isn't at a DEAD stop when shifting from a forward gear to reverse.

Many unskilled or ignorant people can easily nick or "grind gears" when going into reverse with a still moving car, and depending upon how good the condition of the synchronizers in the transmission are (if reverse is synchronized, and sometimes it isn't) it may not have been immediately noticible. Maybe what you're seeing is the result of synchronizers having just reached the point that they are hanging up from damage that happened prior to your experience with the car?

Another possibility:
A high percentage of people park a manual transmission car in gear, and frequently reverse gear is chosen for this. If the car is tapped when in gear, the transmission gearset then in mesh would be taking the brunt of this.

 ;D  I'm sure hvyeqop69 plans on doing more damage then the previous owners :D

How bout 'er :accident:

  Yeehaw im on my way to a pickup demo derby right now.  good luck at your demos this fair season.