Yea I was just wondering in the T5 transmission when the gears clash and grind is it causeing harm to just the gear? Is it also wearing down the countershaft gear?? I mean those are the two gears that are trying to go together and when you hear that grind you know its takin off metal. So If the countershaft gear is grinding is it stronger then the actual gear so it will just grind the other weaker gear and not sustain any damage or is it made primarly the same as the real gear?

Grinding gears as from worn syncros should not harm the countergear, but the metal particles from the grinding won't do the tranny any good. The countergear is always in mesh with
the gears on the mainshaft. I found a good, simple picture under
"4-SPEED!" at www.virtualindian.org/3news4sp.htm#4

Nordbert is right the T-5 is a constently meshed trans. This means that all of the gears are meshing all the time. When you shift the trans. The shift forks in the trans. slides a syncronizer sleeve over on to the next desired gear. The syncro. sleeve engages with a set of teeth called dog teeth which are on each gear. This is what is grinding not the actual gear. Althogh this can create shavings, We all know that metal shaving are not a good thing to have floating around in a trans.

SO IF YOU F** UP THE DOG GEARS OR WHATEVER THEN THE WHOLE GEAR IS SHOT RIGHT?? OR IS THIS A SEPERATE PIECE THAT YOU CAN REPLACE??

There is actually a piece that I forgot to mention it is made out of bronze if Im not mistaken, It is sandwiched in between the gears dog teeth and the syncro sleeve I forgot the actual name of it. but it actually has dog teeth too. It has a taper to it so when the syncro sleeve slides over to engage the gear it first lines up with this bronze piece and the taper on the bronze piece matches up with the taper on the actual gear. The taper is used to cause a drag condition between the gear and syncro sleeve/bronze piece and it will slowly match the speeds of the two. However it is possible to damage the dog teeth on the gear. When this happens you will need to replace the whole gear assembly. It is not very common when they just grind. Usually the dog teeth will break/strip off when you side step (aka drop) the clutch. Hopefully this isn't too confusing! It a whole lot easier to understand if you have seen the actual parts. I had a T-5 in an S-10 and I accidently ground the **** out of it numerous times. When I swapped to a V-8 I took the old trans. apart I was surprised that there was no noticeable damage. This T-5 had about 200,000 miles on it as well.

That is why t-5 use AT fluid, b/c of the bronze

I'm really not sure why they use ATF.

i woulkd think ATF is used because of fact that shavings would tend to fall through that fluid faster than through gear oil and would fall to bottom of case out of way of moving parts..

makes sense to me anyways,

Makes perfect sense to me, the ATF is thinner and will allow particles to fall, the thick molases gear oil would just carry it and run it through every part. Good thinking. I just wonder why some manuals are designed to run with gear oil, huh? Maybe those trans have a magnet to catch metal.

I rebuilt my t-5 2 weekends ago and it did have a magnet on the bottom
The atf is used b/c of the material the t-5's syncros are made out of.