This is not normal and most dealers will not have a clue.
My NV3500 had the same problem and I ended up contacting the transmission
manufacturer and speaking with an engineer. He knew immediately what I was
talking about. For some reason some of the NV3500's, that ended up mostly in
2000 model Dakotas, lacked a detent ball that stabilized the engagement of
the 1-2 shift synchronizer. If everything in the transmission was oriented
in just the right way, instability would result and the damn thing would pop
out of first gear and occasionally second (although second gear disengagement
never happened to me). The orientation of the gears and the synchros have to
be just so which is why this problem occurs at random intervals for brief
"episodes" ("handful" of times then nothing for a few hundred miles then
another "handful" of times and so on and so on).
There is a fix kit available and the dealer should cover it under warrantee.
A description of the problem and the fix is available from All-Data.
This was a difficult problem to get resolved due to the fact that there are
not a lot of manual trannys out there and of those, relatively few had/have
this problem
Good luck
Andrew
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jun 20 2003 - 12:05:15 EDT