[marabak]

Hey guys

I'm a newbie driver and my i30 is the only car I've owned (and only the second I've driven including the instructors diesel Corsa during my lessons). I have had it since September, and it is a 58 plate i30 SE with about 46000 miles on the clock.

Last night, I was taking it out of the parking area around behind my flat so that my girlfriend can use it for a few days whilst her Focus is having its window wipers repaired, and when I put it into reverse and brought the clutch up to the bite point, instead of feeling any pull from the car, I just got a high pitched whirring noise. I took it out of reverse into neutral, then went back into reverse and it worked fine. I manoeuvred back, moved forward again in 1st (the spots are quite awkward) then went back into reverse, and the same thing happened, with the same fix. I drove it out on to the street and then my girlfriend drove home in it with no other problems.

The whirring noise is loud enough to be heard from outside the vehicle (my girlfriend heard it), and I am pretty sure I didn't have the accelerator pressed at the same time (I was edging backwards). As my girlfriend has the car at the moment, I'm not able to test to see if it is currently happening still until probably tonight.

Any ideas what might be the culprit? As I am a new driver, I'm still unsure what are car problems or what might be something to do with my driving technique. Should I take it to a garage to get them to look at it?

Thank you

[eye30]

If it is ok now and when you check later i would guess it wasn't fully in reverse.

What you heard may be the gear teeth catching each others as the moving teeth clatter against the still ones.

[asathorny]

Yeah Lester got there before me....   I too guess that you had not fully engaged the gear...   

[marabak]

Thanks guys

Strange that it is the first time I have done that, and then I did it twice in minutes But I'll check again later when I get it back. At the time, I thought it might have been related to the cold, especially as the car had been standing for a couple of days.

Hopefully it is something as simple as this

[PhireSideZA]

It sounds like the gears just weren't meshing correctly.

Reverse gears have straight cut gears as opposed to your forward gears which are cut at an angle, because usually an idler gear needs to mesh to get the wheels to 'reverse' per se, something which cannot be done with helically cut or 'skew' cut gears.

The reverse idler gear also has no synchro mechanism ('dogs'), which is why you might have a grinding sound as you select reverse as opposed to the fluid engagement of the forward gears (which are helically cut to reduce noise and have collars that synchronise the unput shaft and output shaft speeds before engagement)

So in short, a whirring sound is normal due to the way the gears are designed as the others above have said . Also, don't be afraid to bang 'er in there hard if it doesn't engage properly (but don't blame me if your gear lever detaches from your transmission tunnel )

[Asterix]

 

What is a 58 plate...

[Shambles]

What is a 58 plate...

1st Sep 2008 - 28 Feb 2009 registration date.

[Asterix]

What is a 58 plate...

1st Sep 2008 - 28 Feb 2009 registration date.

You Brit's are crazy..

You haven't gone metric yet and you use strange numbers to cover up the real age of your cars.... 

[marabak]

Haha, actually it is pretty logical

A typical car number plate days starts with two letters denoting the place it was registered, then two numbers for the year (the actual year if registered between March and August (i.e. 08, 14 etc.), or adding 5 to the decade if in the second half of the registration period (i.e. my car is 58 from 08, current reg is 64 from 14). Then we have 3 random letters to make the car unique In the words of a famous meerkat popular on UK TV, simples Much more logical than the old A123ABC format we used to have


Back on topic though, I took my car to Tesco last night (I needed to do some shopping anyway), and I couldn't recreate the issue, even when actually trying to not put into reverse properly (I probably didn't try that hard though, as I don't want to break anything). So hopefully it was just me, and not a mechanical fault

Thanks everyone for their contributions