Originally Posted by cletis
Even after having my tranny in the burb reworked to prevent it, it still occasionally jumped out of 3rd gear. The rebuilder told me it must be in the linkage or the pilot bushing. Now I didn't give much credence to the pilot bushing theory because GMCs use a pilot bearing. And I knew the shifter was going all the way into 3rd. But after it jumped out 4 times in 300 miles this weekend I decided to take one more look last night. I pulled the floor cover and started studying.

I found that when it was fully engaged into 3rd, the shift rod was fouling hard against the 1st-reverse rod. Jiggling the 1st reverse rod would kick the 3rd lever out of it's lock detent. Of course when that happens on the road it's only a matter of time before it jumps out of gear.

I tweeked the 2nd-3rd arm to allow clearance. I haven't test driven it yet but I feel confident I've solved that problem.

Then I moved to the hood latch. I had trouble opening the hood at a car show Saturday. It has been hard to open for a while and I put white grease on it recently but it hardly helped. Last night, after struggling to open the hood again, I pulled the latch to try to fix it. I couldn't find anything obviously wrong with it except it has years of dust caked into the grease on the underside. Rather than clean it up I installed a cleaned and painted latch I had in my swap meet inventory. It opens like a new one now.

When we were in Kansas City my Suburban started an annoying metal to metal squeak. We traced it to the driver's door. But I could not find any signs of metal to metal in the door jamb or on the door. Yesterday I finally figured it out. The screws holding the bottom of the window track were missing and the rack was rubbing inside the door. Of course I had to pull the door panel to fix it. While I was in there I fixed another problem.

I had previously put a locking button in the driver's door handle but it quit locking. So I pulled that out. I discovered the keeper that holds the springs in had broken, one end of it was bent up, keeping the springs from pushing the pins into position. So while I had it out I re-pinned it to work with the ignition key. I didn't like the idea of having a separate key anyhow. I installed new springs as required and a new keeper.

I think we're now ready for the Lone Star Loop 1000 mile trip coming up in a couple of weeks.

Cletis,
Great horde of information here for little squeaky irritating problems many of us suffer with.

~Jim