Hi Guys,

I was travelling at around 40 MPH I dropped the car down a couple of gears to overtake managed to go from 3rd to 4th gear but then could not get it into 5th.

The car is now stuck in 4th gear I can disengage the gear with the clutch but the gear stick will only go forwards into 3rd and back into 4th and you can do that without the car coming out of 4th gear! The is no movement in the gear stick left or right and when I push it forwards it feels loose and there's a little resistance before it goes fully forwards, but like I said there is no affect on the gears at all.

Any idea whats wrong my initial thought is possibly a linkage has broken but I've no idea.

Its a 2015 Fiesta 1.0T EcoBoost Zetec S Black Edition

 

Added some pics of the linkages in the engine bay and under the gear stick not sure that will help though. for the links in the engine I can move the one on the right 3 clicks cut I can't move the longer one at all.

 

This sounds like a broken fork inside the gearbox.  I would recommend disconnecting both cables at the gearbox end then see if you can manually deselect 4th.  If yes, it's a cable issue, if no, it's a gearbox issue.

How do I manually deselect 4th?

2 minutes ago, nightnicon said:

How do I manually deselect 4th?

Rotate the rust-coloured selector around it's pivot point back to the centre.  And pull the bottom lever up or down until that reaches the centre point as well.  Then the gearbox should be in neutral.  Take care not to trap your fingers anywhere.

OK so I disconnected the cables at the gearbox end. I can now freely move both the pivot plate and the bottom lever.

The pivot plate clicks 3 times left right and center. The bottom lever does not click but moves up and down freely and returns to center. If I lift the bottom lever up and move the pivot plate it stays up likewise when the plate goes back to middle the bottom one returns to center. Same if I move the bottom lever down and move the plate it stays then returns once the plate is centered.

Car is now in neutral, gear stick side feels dodgy as hell now but has free movement, I know with the cables disconnected the resistance won't be there but as far as I can tell it won't move across to 5th or reverse but its hard to tell. Also when putting it in 1st and 2nd the stick is moving back towards the middle.

Just a note there was an acrid smell when I first started the car up so switch off then started again smell went. I can only assume this is remnants from last night when I had to pull off in 4th gear 😮 in order to get the car the last mile home and the clutch was burning a bit due to this so hopefully I've not knackered it as well!

I recorded a couple of vids to show this hope its OK to share the youtube links here.

 

 

 

Hmm, that's interesting.

The bottom lever should hold in every position up or down.  But it may just be that you don't have enough strength in fingers to get it fully into gear.  (The reason the gear stick is so long).

I think the next test is to disconnect the gearstick end of the cables.  Set your phone up on video in front of the car then push and pull each cable to it's full extent.  Both cables just simply move in & out of the cable sheath so it should be easy to tell if they're moving fully or not.

If the gearbox works mechanically, and the cables move fully, then it looks like a fault with the gearstick assembly.  I'm not sure whether that would be repairable or whether to just swap in a good used part instead.

Update: the issue is fixed it turned out to be the cable had come out of the retaining bracket you can see it moving around in the video. So I just pushed the plastic part back into the bracket and fixed it.