Saturn Shifter Bushing

A month ago, the shift lever suddenly became loose and could no longer shift gears. The lever was floating. The instructor for Auto 50B thought it might be a shifter bushing. I did further research on the saturnfans.com forums and learned that this was a common problem for the Saturn S-series.

I removed the console and parts of the lower dash to view the shift cable and shift lever linkages. Sure enough, I found the broken bushing for the cable that sends the up and down lever motion to the transmission. Thank goodness the problem was not due to a broken shift cable or broken linkage at the transmission end.

The bushing looks like plastic spindle that is pinned to the shift lever to allow it to spin. The spindle part is wrapped around by the shift cable's eyelet. The cap end of the bushing broke off so the cable eyelet was no longer secured to the bushing.

Unfortunately, Saturn does not sell this plastic piece by itself. I have to buy the shift cable assembly (~$200) to get it. The good news is that there is a guy on Ebay who is making and selling the bushings from Delrin or stainless steel. Here is his webpage.