Last night I'm driving in some pretty heavy traffic. When I took off at a traffic light, I mistakenly shifted into nuetral. No matter what I did, I could not get into second gear. It's like the grears would rub and clatter on each other, but would not go into gear. I ended up slowing to around 10mph, reving the engine and shifting into first--which resulted in a crash. How does this happen if the clutch is disengaged?

This happened a few time before. Once I got pissed and just jammed it into first at around 25 mph. This resulted in what could only be described as gearbox disaster.

Anyway, is this normal (surely not!)? I mean, WTF is going on here? Anyone have a complete 97-99 transmission guts they can sell?

--Thanks, Chris

PS, when changing the gearbox innards, do the cases have to be split?

 

WOW. . .scary stuff. This has actually happened to me before on my 96, but no problems when I pull in the clutch, shift back to first then to second. I honestly don't see how that could happen unless the clutch failed in some way. Are you certain you had the handle pulled all the way in before you did this? On a few occasions, I have shifted with a finger between the grip and the handle which prevented the clutch from fully disengaging and while I didn't crash, the bike jumped and I had to change my undies when I got home. Sorry to read about your problem, but I personally wouldn't trust riding until everything was changed. . .but that's just me.

 

Hi, Sorry for the confusion. When I said 'crash', I meant the gearbox crashed; not me! It made a horrible crunch. I understand that our gearboxes are sometimes called 'crash boxes' (amoungst other things) in the race community, but I never thought I would get a crash that bad...

--Thanks, Chris