If you own a Sam Chalak or BPM half dog or full dog box, then you may have inadvertantly locked your tranny into 2nd gear. This can happen when you shift in a diagonal pattern from 2nd to 3rd gear. This has the bad habit of attempting to select 3rd gear before the 2nd gear shift fork has disengaged 2nd gear.

Suddenly, you feel like you have missed that crucial 3rd gear shift, and you are angry at yourself for botching the shift. But your woes won't end there! You clutch again and try to shift to 3rd, but the shifter won't move!

Hopefully you aren't far from home or a shop that would be willing to help you out! But with these instructions, we'll have that tranny back to normal in no time, and you'll hopefully improve your shifting technique.

The key here is that your shifter will appear to be in neutral, but you won't be able to select any gears. The tranny is locked in 2nd gear, and there is nothing you can do about it from above. What we need to do is move the 2nd gear shift fork out of 2nd gear.

Because the Subaru Tranny sits with the rear of the tranny lower than the front, it is important that we get the front of the tranny lower than the rear. You are going to have to either suspend your car on jack stands, or get it on a lift. In either event, you will want the car to look raked, and its ideal to get the rear about 3 or 4 inches higher than front.

Now lets look at your tranny:

In this picture, the right most arrow is pointing to a 12mm bolt. This is the bottom most bolt of 3 identical bolts lined up in the vertical plain. They are the shifter balls for your tranny, and contain a spring and a tiny ball bearing. The topmost bolt holds the shifter ball for 5th gear and reverse. The middle bolt holds the shifter ball for 3rd and 4th gear. and the bottom bolt holds the shifter ball for 1st and 2nd gear. Get a catch can underneath your transmission and remove this bottom bolt, being extra careful you do not drop the spring.

Now you will need a magnetic parts grabber. It has to be small enough to fit into the hole that the bolt goes into. Carefully extract the small ball bearing that is inside. It may take a couple of tries.

Now get yourself a medium small mechanics screw driver, and insert it into the hole. It should go in about 20mm or so. Inside the hole, you can feel something with a few indentations in it. This is the 1st/2nd shift fork. You need to move this fork forward with your screwdriver. If you suspended the car correctly, with the rear higher than the front, then it may take very little effort to slide this fork forward. (Conversely, it would take no effort to slide the fork forward if the tranny was extracted since you could put it input shaft down and the fork would probably fall without its bearing to hold it) You may not even be aware that the fork has moved at all! To test if the fork has disengaged 2nd, you can feel your shifter to see if it is now in neutral. If so, put everything back together now! Top off your tranny with some 75w90 too. If not, keep trying to move that shift fork forward. with the screw driver. Insert it into the hole, feel for the indentations, and then press against it and push the handle towards the rear of the car. If you have done everything properly, it should only take you 1 to 5 minutes of fiddling with the fork to get it to move forward.

I was surprised when I attempted this method of unsticking my gear box as it literally took me almost ZERO effort to unlock my transmission.

If all esle fails, there is a back-up method. Simply put the bolt back in, without the spring and ball bearing and drive around the block. The only bad part about this is that as soon as the fork pops out of 2nd, you will have to stop and put the spring and ball bearing back in right away.

And of course, if you have any other questions, feel free to email the Scoobymods team. Have fun out there and keep it safe!

-Danny