Hey all,

Just a quick question about the shifting on my automatic 1990 240. This has only happened to me once, but what happens once can happen again. The day after driving my car 1200 miles on a 4-day road trip (thank you brickboard for helping me fix it up enough to do that), I drove it to work, about 25 miles on the highway, as usual. Just as I exited, a large, slow truck pulled out of a driveway in front of me, so I slowed down, hard, from 60mph to maybe 20mph.

After the truck turned, I tried to speed up again. But the gears didn't shift. The noise from the engine just kept getting louder and louder, so I assumed the RPMs were beyond where they should be for the gear, and slowed down and limped to work at about 20mph.

At lunch, just to experiment, with the car on but motionless, I tried manually shifting between park, reverse, neutral, drive, 1'st and 2'nd. Each shift resulted in a noticable thump and lurch of the car, each of which also made my heart thump and lurch.

So after work I started limping home, at 20mph. I stopped for an errand, and again ran the car through all its gears, again noticing the lurches. Only at some point, the lurching stopped. When I pulled the car back onto the road, all was well (no shifting problems at all), and it's been fine since (2 weeks).

Can anybody tell me what happened? I know I once saw a thread dealing with this subject on the brickboard, but as hard as I look I can't seem to find it again. I think it was a relatively simple repair, and I'd hate to get stranded far from home going 20mph just because I can't remember some very good advice.