The situation bears updating with a text-heavy post.
For a 41 year-old auto, Ludwig has been doing a lot of duty this Summer--about 400 miles a week (400 miles a week isn't all that much, you say? No 2014 Honda or Chevy or whatever will be doing that in the year 2055, I assure you with total confidence) and he's had his troubles but he's really been giving it his all. Then at the end of August he had to go rescue Sylvie, whose power steering pump had failed (above).
This extra duty proved too much for him, however. Leaving the campground for work the next morning, he would not come out of first gear. He's been stuck in gear before but that time it was in 2nd, a far more useful gear to be stuck in (for the record, the gears you want to be stuck in, from best to worst, are 3rd, 2nd, 1st, R, and 4th). He took a ride on the hook to the Library.
Suspecting trouble similar to the 2006 adventure, I puttered around town for a week before taking him to the local ex-ACVW guy (there are no current ACVW guys in the world anymore, except in SoCal) to confirm my suspicions. Unfortunately they were confirmed, so camping with a visiting Vanagon family wasn't in the cards for Labor Day weekend...but an engine-transaxle drop was. Everything out and the transaxle nosecone off, the problem revealed itself immediately.
The orange arrow thing is the thing that shifts gears. The yellow arrow thing is a pin holding the orange arrow thing in place on the blue arrow thing, a bracket. The red arrow thing is one of two bolts holding the bracket in place. The bolt had stripped its hole, so the bracket was no longer held in place, so the orange arrow thing could move all it wanted but was no longer doing any work--specifically, getting out of 1st gear.
We're waiting on a local machinist to get the proper sized insert to rethread that hole and then, knock on wood, we can put the whole thing together again.
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