well guys my friday night sucked... the whole plan was to take the old lady out in the iroc for a night on the town and what ended up happenin was i went out on the town in the truck down to autozone and bought me a new shift linkage while she stayed at the house. any way heres my question is there any little tricks that you need to know when puting the new shift cable in. i know that the tranny needs to be in Neautral along with the gear shift to get every thing set right but when i did that the clips that hold the linkage down poped out of the brackets (on both sides) and now my cable bent also not to the point that is unusable though i also can not get the tranny to go in to any gear unless i hold the cable and push/pull it w/ m,y hands. the car is a 86 iroc that has a 77 vette 350 in it and a 700r4 (dont know what this came out of junkyard special). this tranny also wont down shift even @ full throttle any help would be great.
thanks

I don't recall needing any "tricks" to install the shift cable, but then I got mine from GM. I can't imagine any sort of bent-ness in the cable being a good or acceptable thing.

It won't shift down under any condition unless manually shifted?

no the transmission will downshift but it slips very bad. i think it needs to be rebuilt.