aasukisuki

Hi everyone,

I recently purchased a '97 cobra and love the car. However, there are a few things the car is doing, and i'm wondering if anyone has a rough guess as to what they are before I take it somewhere. I'll give you a rundown of the 4 major things:

1) The transmission regularly pops out of reverse. I've read the technical service bulletin from Ford on this, and it sounds like the transmission needs to be taken apart to fix it. Anyone have any experience with this particular problem?

2) When shifting from first to second gear, the car will sometimes make a clunk sound.

3) When the car gets up to 55+mph, it starts vibrating. This isn't a constant vibration, but instead a slow, deep, pulsing vibration. It's kind of hard to explain, but every second or so it will vibrate and then it stops. It goes from being completely silent, to gradually vibrating and then back down. The best explanation I can give is to look at a sound wave. The bottom of the wave is no vibration, the top is the car vibrating, and the rest is the gradual increase and decrease in vibration.

4) When accelerating, usually in 2nd or 3rd gear, i will very occasionally hear a sort of grinding/whining noise coming from what seems to be the front of the car. This one is the most sporatic of all of the issues i've described, and it's only happened a handful of times.

Thanks for your time,

Jeremy

lazyeye

sounds like you need to rebuild the tranny or do a complete swap

aasukisuki

Thanks for the reply.

I knew from the service bulletin that the transmission would need to be torn apart to fix the popping out of reverse issue, so I imagine I might as well just replace it. Based off of the other symptoms, do you think those are all related to the transmission?

Regarding point #4, I was able to reproduce that regularly. It happens when I'm going around a corner and accelerating. It sounds like a rubbing/grinding noise, so i'm assuming it's tires rubbing or something along those lines.

I haven't climbed under the car entirely, but did notice that the bottom of the diferential is wet. Hopefully i'll have some more info this weekend when I have time to get under it.

N896Cobra

The popping out of reversr could just be a new clutch is needed or the gear synchronizer. It sounds like all of them could be all related to the transmission. How many miles is on the car?

AZ SNAKE

sounds like a syncro may be bad. I agree all these could be fixed by a trans rebuild

aasukisuki

Some new, albeit disheartening, information:

I took it into a ford dealership and it sounds like the transmisison needs to be rebuilt at the least and replaced at the most. They said it sounds like a bearing problem in the transmission and that there is a driveline imbalance.

They also found that someone had adjusted the idle screw on the throttle body which is causing the check engine light to stay on.

Also found out that the bushings on the trailing arms are worn out and a previous owner had welded mounts onto the body.

And finally someone has recently had the cover off of the rear end.

So it looks like I have a bunch of stuff to do on the cobra that I just bought