| Transferbox Neutral and related warnings | |
The topic has probably been discussed ad nauseam but here's my story for what it's worth:
Over the past few years, I had been getting Transferbox Neutral warnings flashing by, oftentimes too fast to read. Though the car's behavior was unaffected, whenever they became too frequent and annoying, a restart would see them sorted. The low range would also be unavailable unless the car had been restarted. This could happen any time of the year and may or may not have been coinciding with recent use of low range -which I think it likely did-
Monday morning I began to get transmission failsafe program warnings on and off. The IID gave the following codes:
("Noise on actuator signal has been ever present" and I haven't cleared any faults after the repair attempt so might do that later today...)
0x8D Transmission Interface Bus fault
TBOX-Transfer Case
0x5223 Noise on actuator signal -
0x5221 Sensor short circuit to battery -
TCM-Transmission
0x20 Output shaft speed sensor fault: General fault
The car would put up with several bongs in a row before actually going into failsafe with a harsh shift. Some times it did not really default to failsafe but rather continue to change gears though sport and manual remained unavailable. The low range switch would have no effect and even when it actually did work, I would become stuck to low range until it randomly cleared long enough to allow shifting into high.
Clearing most aforementioned faults was possible, with the exception of the 0x5221
I tried fuse 37 and, while it would actually set transfer to neural, no further calibration was allowed, as rhe failsafe would be triggered time and again.
Classically being August with all garages closed, I decided to take a peek inside the shifter motor and decide what I should be ordering for.
Instead of removing rhe whole assembly, I followed the least invasive method of removing the cover plate, to reveal the potentiometer. Everything looked fine until I pulled the plug. The 3 male contact leads seems covered in greyish residue which I carefully scraped off with a flat blade screwdriver.
 | | Click image to enlarge |
After reconnecting, I was able to cycle through high and low several times with no warnings or inconsistent messages. Drove the car for 50km with an intermediate refueling stop and all is good so far.
I wonder how many owners have been faced with unnecessary repair bills in the hundreds or thousands for nothing, really. So if you're getting the odd transmission failsafe program or transfer transfercase Neutral or high range out of the blue, it is a 15 minute job cleaning the potentiometer contacts. Really worth trying before taking a decision to go forward with expensive repairs.
Do have a tube of red loctite handy for the screws though.
That's all
|
13th Aug 2025 10:38am
