Recently, a long time customer came in because she had lost the use of 5th gear in her 2003 Tundra 5 speed transmission. The truck has been immaculately cared for since she got it and the transmission made no noticeable noise, so we were sure no serious problems had occurred. As it happens, Toyota 5 speed transmissions have had a common failure for a long time that is related to a plastic ball socket in the shifter.
When the truck gets old the plastic deteriorates and the shifter drops further into the transmission than it is supposed to. Eventually the transmission housing interferes with the shifter and it cannot move into 5th gear. There is nothing wrong with the transmission, just the shifter mechanism.
A simple test for this issue is to lift on the shifter while moving it into 5th gear. The shifter is spring loaded down so some effort is required, but if the vehicle goes 5th gear, this could be the problem. The repair costs are reasonable. This arrangement has been used in cars and trucks from approximately 1977 to recently. Some of these include the Toyota Celica, Corona, T100, Tacoma and Tundra. Happy Jap’s would love to help you with this or other transmission problems.
We have a new tool here at Happy Jap’s, and it may help diagnose an intermittent problem with your car.
Modern cars (For these purposes 1996 and up) use whats known as OBDII. This is a system that monitors several aspects of your cars performance. The on board computer measures several engine parameters such as throttle position, and ignition timing, and much more. All this data is used several ways. The computer uses the data to make constant adjustment to engine inputs (fuel, air, etc.) to keep performance and emissions within standards. It also tracks data to warn the driver in the event of a problem. This is what turns on your check engine light.
As you can imagine, this information can be very useful for diagnosing problems. However, we have to connect a computer to the car to view this information. When there is an intermittent problem with the car, it has to occur while we are watching or the data does us no good. Naturally, the cars run perfectly when in the shop, but not when the customer has it.
The solution? The MAC Tools ET3010 allows us to record up to 24 hours of data from a cars computer. This means we can plug the device in, and let the customer drive the car normally until it fails. Using this data we can form a picture of what is going wrong, and find a solution. This should ease headaches for both the mechanic and the customer!
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