How a $1 part can become a $700 repair

I pulled into the Publix parking lot last night, and put the gearshift into reverse. The gearshift lever goes thunk, and the gearshift starts moving freely. Hmm... not good. The car is in gear, but it's in reverse, which isn't terribly useful to try going somewhere for repairs. After contemplating for a bit, I pull off the center console and take a look. What I find is that there is a pin on the gearshift lever which goes into a loop on the transmission linkage. Holding the two together is a 1 inch diameter and 1/2 inch thick plastic bushing with a socket in it for the gearshift pin. Or in my case, two half bushings. Now that I know how it works, I'm able to limp home by holding the linkage together with one hand and shifting with the other.

Once I get home, I start searching the internet and find out this is a quite common problem with that era Saturn manual transmission. I find several descriptions of home remedies, which tend to involve drilling out the pin and through bolting the whole mess. Not ideal, but it'll work if nothing else will. There are also several variations on replacing the bushing available on e-Bay which don't require removing the pin.

One of the articles I found also detailed the OEM fix. Saturn does not make the bushing available as a separate OEM part but only as part of the whole OEM transmission linkage, which makes a sort of sense since the lips on the bushing won't fit through the loop on the linkage. The article quoted the price for that part as $375. In addition, since the linkage is threaded through the very tight center console, through the firewall, and into the engine compartment, it takes about four hours to replace the linkage. No thanks, I don't want to spend $700 to replace a cheap piece of plastic.

So I've ordered one of the bushings from e-Bay. In the meantime, I've put the two bushing halves back together with the pin and loop, and electrical taped the whole mess together. It's not pretty, but it does the job.

This does make me wish I had some alternative for transportation to work though. The weekend before Gencon I took a class to get a motorcycle license, but haven't gotten a bike yet because they cause as much new as a car, and seem to depreciate more slowly than cars do. Maybe I'll go bike lusting again this weekend.

Oh, and the simple laptop fix doesn't work for mine. Grr...