1972 Grand Prix Automatic Park Issue?
 

Hello everybody this is my first post to any forum of any kind what so ever so I hope I did everything right.

Well me and my dad did a transmission fluid, filter, and gasket change on his 1972 Grand Prix. We backed it out of our driveway since its at a angle after we changed it all to check the trans fluid. Then the car would not go into park and it was very hard to shift gears From Reverse to Neutral and from Neutral to Drive and back etc. Then they key would not come out as if it was still in gear and not in park probably because it was not in park. The gear shifter indicator says it is in park but it is really in reverse. There is the linkage attached to the pan that we had to move to get the pan off but that is all we did. So now we have figured out that to get it to kinda work is move the steering column that attaches to the steering wheel in order to get it to go into park and let us take the key out. We are not sure how to adjust this linkage to make it right and make it stay right.
We know that if we move the linkage it will be like shifting. We just do not know how to adjust it to make park line up with park on the floor shifter.

Also it was letting us start the car not in park sometimes we turned it off in neutral ( we think it was ) to go try and adjust and then we were able to turn it back on later in either reverse or neutral not sure.

This is hard to explain and I will provide some pictures later but if anybody can help us we would really appreciate it. It was all fine before we did this and are not sure what to do.

Thank you !

You are at the right place, welcome aboard. should be an easy adjustment. myself i have only worked on my Lemans. And i went through exactly what you are going through. A GP guy will see this and jump into help. Hang in there!

Thank you ! I know we can adjust it kinda its all weird but Im not sure how to lock everything in place once we get it set up if there is a way. Hope to figure it out though!!

Hoping this is a console shifter?


And you didn't mess with anything else.


:)


Here is a pic of the shifter.

Depending on how you took the cable bracket off, will determine what needs done. Hopefully you just took the little clip off the slector pin for the cable.
If you took the nut and pin off, that is probably your problem. It needs adjusted.


Also when putting the bracket back on, need to make sure it's on correctly. (can't remember if idiot proof)
Also if you took the cable off from the bracket, the clip holding it has to be on correctly.


Also the column lock rod may be out of adjustment, since you have problems with the ignition key.


The pic doesn't show that rod adjustment.


http://forums.maxperformanceinc.com/...1&d=1532394130




:)

If after you unhook the cable from the shift arm you try and move the floor shifter, and it's stiff while being disconnected, there's a possibility that the engine/transmission isn't properly grounded.

When this condition exists the shift cable is being used as a ground cable. The cable overheats and actually melts the plastic inside binding up the cable. I've seen this happen at least twice over the years. Usually happens when someone has done engine work, or replaced the engine without hooking up all the ground straps.

This may not be your problem, but I figured I'd put it out there in case it may be.

When We took the pan off all we did was take off the bracket and move everything out of the way to clearance the pan, So that is probably what was wrong and as for the ignition we are still trying to figure that out.

I don't think that the engine was taken out and it was fine before we dropped the trans pan but thank you we will definitely check that out don't want that to possibly happen

Just curious if you got the problem resolved and if so, what the problem turned out to be. Thanks.

Where you just able to re-adjust the shift cable?