Overall I've very much enjoyed driving my CX-5, but there had always been something niggling that wasn't quite right with the transmission;
- It was difficult to engage reverse, first and second gear, always feeling hesitant and 'graunchy' in those gears and sometimes not wanting to engage at all
- In first and second gear, the clutch biting point felt inconsistent and 'mushy', making pulling away smoothly quite difficult at times
- When crawling in first or second gear, the transmission take-up was horrible and the car would 'shunt' when accelerating or decelerating
I was getting fed up of this and starting to look into getting my clutch and/or flywheel changed, assuming that this was the issue - that was until I was researching the issue online and came across a Mazda 3 TSB from the States describing similar issues and a fix that looked very easy, so I decided to try it out...
...IT'S WORKED! My clutch and gearbox feel factory-new and eager to engage any gear, crawling in slow traffic is no longer embarrassing as the car will crawl along happily, and the clutch biting point feels positive and precise. The car feels like it's had a new clutch and flywheel
The TSB relates to Mazda 3 manual transmission models built before 11/11/2013, and with my car being registered in April 2014 was probably built around this time. It's not even the same model as mentioned in the TSB but I reasoned that the gearbox itself and/or its setup is probably the same, and the fix took less than five minutes so was worth a shot.
If anyone is having similar issues with their CX-5 (or 3 or 6 for that matter) of a similar age or older, give this a try as it may make the same difference for you as me (that is, it's made the car totally brilliant to drive!)
Oh, the TSB:
http://australiancar.reviews/_pdfs/SB-10059728-0335.pdf
