3 speed shifting problems

[Farmer John]

Greetings. I have a 1996 geo prizm with i believe to be a 1.6 liter and a 3 speed automatic transmission. I was backing out of the driveway when the car made a loud bang and stopped. I put it back into drive and it banged again. After a few checks of the drive shafts my father-in-law suggested the differential must have lost a tooth on the ring gear. So after pulling the trans-axle assembly and dismantiling the diff and finding nothing out of the ordanary I went deeper. I dissassembled the transmission and found nothing. I then put it back together to have my neighbor help find the problem. We found the passenger side axle to be the culpret. The outboard snapring came out of it's groove allowing the axle to slid outboard. The allowed the inboard slip joint to actually come apart, which is where the banging was coming from. So i replaced the axle/cv assemblies. Then while driving it to town to have the battery connections replaced i found that it has a hard time shifting to 2nd and doesn't go into 3rd.

Now i wonder where i goofed on my transmission reassembly. In drive it doesn't go into 2nd, but if you start in first and manually shift it will go into 2nd. If you then shift into drive it acts like it is in neutral. Motor revs up with no load. I did not replace seals when i had it apart.

Help! I need to know where to go in the tranny to resolve this problem.

[trife96]

did you ever find that snap ring???

[Farmer John]

Well, i never lost the snap ring. It stayed on the axle shaft, just slid in-board from it's orignal groove. I talked to a couple local shops and they have not run into that before. It did happen to reman axles that were installed quite a while back.