Oh Lordy, I now own a Fordy (a Lincoln actually)..

[njsteve]

Looks like my dog is a jinx. Part 2

Last weekend I had replaced the master cylinder and sanded and repainted the brake booster. I also pulled out the starter to get it rebuilt locally to solve the hard hot start issue. Turns out it had a bent armature. He had it fixed overnight and I put it in Saturday morning. Boy is that thing heavy, especially when you have to lift it one handed and try to squeeze it in sideways between the steering linkage and the frame.

After I got the starter in, I took the Lincoln out yesterday to buy dogfood for the dog. As I merged with traffic on a local side road, the transmission shifted weirdly into third - actually it sounded like it was shifting and the engine RPM changed but the car was not moving forward any faster. I manually shifted into second and the problem disappeared. I put it in drive and it then shifted normally to third.

I got the dogfood and went to drive to my buddy's garage to tell him about the shift glitch. We discover that the vacuum line to the transmission modulator was not connected. That seemed like a totally logical reason for the weird shift incident. I thank him and go to leave. I put it in reverse and back up a few feet and then shift to drive.....nothing happens. No first gear, no second gear, no third gear. No forward movement at all. I was like the shifter linkage fell off only I still had park, reverse, and neutral. So Al, my mechanic buddy declared my transmission DOA and I called AAA to tow it home. Luckily I was only 6 miles away and they flatbedded to my driveway and I was able to back it into its space in the garage.