Intermittant grinding into 3rd and no 5th.

[Cviji]

A couple of days ago I was driving along and it started to grind as I put the A4 into 3rd (more so when coming down instead of going up the gears) And then today, I could not get it into 5th atall, however an hour later when I drove the car it seemed to be going in ok. any ideas on the problem here? Is it sounding like the gearbox is goosed?

 

[Layerz]

Cviji sounds like the clutch is playing about a bit, I had this when changing down and needed to replace the slave cyclinder on the clutch.

I duno if it is worth bleeding it a bit to see if you got some trapped air in there.

 

[Cviji]

I see, That sounds better than a new gearbox. Car had a new clutch 20k or so ago though.

 

[Layerz]

Yea, but the clutch system is hyrdraulic, sometimes it gets air into it or something (I am not the best on technical descriptions) and it can be down to the slave cylinder or master cylinder.
Mine was the slave affecting changing down through the gears, but bleeding it brought me more time like a year the first time it happened.

I also learned how to perform a clutchless shift but they are hard work and require precise revs and speed

 

[Cviji]

I spoke to a garage about this recently. They said it was most likely to be a clutch fault causing the grinding, but loosing 5th gear was likely to be a problem with the gearbox? could the clutch not be causing this aswell?