Topic: Advice on '67 C4 coming out of park? Bad parking pawl?

[drummingrocks]

My '67 coupe has had an annoying problem since the day I brought it home.  It's a C4 automatic, and if you're on an incline and put it in park, the parking pawl doesn't really want to engage.  The car might roll a little and then it's like something locks into place and you're fully in park.  It's not a problem with the shifter; it almost feels like maybe the parking pawl in the transmission is worn out.  Or maybe somebody put the car in park while it was being driven and that damaged something.

I'm pretty sure this is the car's original C4.  It could stand to be rebuilt, but I'd like to put that off as long as possible.  I would like to fix the park issue since my wife is driving the car more often.  Is this something that would be fairly easy to fix, or would the entire transmission need to be pulled and gone through? 

[67gtasanjose]

If you are absolutely sure it is NOT the shifter (since that is 99% the cause) maybe this picture helps answer your question better than 1000 words.

Otherwise, inside the trans pan area, even with the valve body removed, usually nothing goes wrong in there, so it seems like it would be a blind stab-in-the-dark to think it would be repairable w/o pulling the transmission. I suppose if you wished to drain the transmission and lower the valve body to look, it would not hurt, just expect to keep going deeper when you do. Personally, not only do I pull the pan before pulling the transmission but I also drain the torque converter before pulling mine out...makes for less of a mess...but that's just me

Richard

[drummingrocks]

Richard,  thanks for your help.  It may be a while before I can tear into it and see what's going on.  And truthfully, since I suspect the transmission needs to be built anyway, I'll probably end up just pulling the whole unit and taking it to a local rebuilder.