When I put my car in park today and pushed one of the front wheels the car swayed back and forth. I really didn't give it that much force as I was only using one arm. My TL currently has 144,000 miles on it, so I was wondering if something like this is normal with a car with this many miles? Or does it have something to do with the transmission?

The reason I was pushing the tire was to listen for creaks in the suspension which is an issue in itself. Any help will be greatly appreciated!

 

Parking Prawl - A parking pawl is a device fitted to a motor vehicle's automatic transmission in order for it to lock up the transmission. It is engaged when the transmission shift lever selector is placed in the Park position

The parking pawl locks the transmission's output shaft to the transmission casing by engaging a pawl (a pin) that engages in a notched wheel on the shaft, stopping it (and thus the driven wheels) from rotating. The main components of a parking pawl mechanism are the parking gear, parking pawl, Actuator rod, cam collar, cam plate, pivot pin and parking pawl return spring. The mechanism assembly is designed so that the parking pawl tooth collides and overrides the parking gear teeth (ratchets) until a safe engagement speed for the vehicle is reached. Software controls are put in place to avoid this condition and engage the pawl only when the vehicle has come to a stand still.

 

 

I'm assuming that is what the click noise I hear after putting it into park after the car rolls forward a bit. So, possibly it hasn't engaged all the way which has caused the play when I push the tire?

 

right, i had gotten busy, but basically its normal.

 

Thanks for the info!

 

do you see how small the parking prawl is?
this little lever, or pin, holds the weight of your car.
What happens if that pin/lever gives or breaks!?

the proper procedure to park the car is to:
come to a complete stop.
with your foot on the brake, pull the parking brake.
put the car in park.

this will prevent the car from rocking back and fourth when you park, putting as little stress as possible on the parking prawl

 

The parking pawl is usually before the final drive so it has a 5:1 leverage (or whatever the final drive ratio is) on the wheels. That's part of the reason it can be small, they don't take the full force from the wheels did to gear multiplication. They're still really beefy. When you hear the click after putting it park she the car rolls a little it's the pawl engaging. Sometimes the "gear" that it locks into is on a peak instead of a valley so it's not engaged until it rotates to one of the valleys. It spins at a 5:1 ratio to the tires and it might have 20 or more teeth so it only takes very little movement of the wheels to make it engage or click if it didn't do it when you first put it into park.

About the gear reduction, if you put a bicycle crank in place of the engine and pedaled using the cars overall 1st or 2nd gear ratio you would be able to pedal with little resistance. Most people have no problem with making 100lbs of torque but at that gear ratio you couldn't pedal fast enough while maintaining that torque (hp) to get any appreciable speed but you would probably be able to break the tires free if the car were held still. So it's really not that much of a load on the pawl. You actually have more torque against the brake calipers during hard braking (not taking into account the diameter of the pawl since I don't know it).

Justin, do the mods rotate avatar pictures for you or is that your doing? I lol every time I see a new crab picture.