I saw a post similar to this in 2006, but it didn’t seem to get resolved entirely.
My shifter has had this problem for about two years, since I got the car. It will fall out of place and hit the heat shield. I’m able to pull it back up and reseated the gasket, but after a week of use it will drop again. To remedy this every so often I’ll just pull the shifter up, hoping to keep it in place.
Two days ago I was switching to a short shifter, thinking this would be the permanent fix and add some fun. What I found was that thehousing that the shifter sits in is what’s falling, and it is held in place with what appears to be a friction fit between two rubber feet and the chassis.
Has anyone else had any experience with this? Maybe shed some light on this problem and find a permanent fix?
Weird, I’ve never heard of this. I’ll ask around and see if I can figure anything out as well. Hopefully someone else will see this and knows whats going on.
“My shifter (MTX) fell out of the hole.
This is common. The shifter is isolated from the body of the car by a rubber bushing between the shifter and the mounting point in the shifter assembly. The problem is that the rubber rots and allows the shifter to fall out of the hole. Some go to the junkyard and find a replacement but that shifter is just as old and will do the same thing. Others use self-tapping screws to fasten the shifter to the body of the assembly. Since they aren’t supposed to be hard fastened (meaning they aren’t supposed to move at the same time thus the reason rubber is used) I wouldn’t do it this way. The way I fix them is clean the hole out with sandpaper and use some JB Weld to secure the rubber to the body of the assembly, the way it was originally secured.”
Google says JB Weld is a kind of epoxy? I had thought about epoxying it before, but figured that if it came out there was a reason for it and I shouldn’t be hindering that.