hard shifting tranny and battery drain

I went to look at a truck today and I noticed a couple of things that were wrong with the truck and was wondering if you guys have any ideas on possible causes. The truck is an '07 9900i with a ISX, 13spd, and 301k. The current owner bought it two years ago with 210k on it and he uses it for his own cattle/grain hauling. That is why the miles are so low.

1st problem is the tranny is hard to shift in/out of gear, the tranny in my truck is kinda hard to shift but this one was worse. The clutch seemed to be fine and the clutch brake worked also. The tranny is an eaton 13spd and the truck has 301,000 on it. Also, I don't know if it matters, but the truck is set up with a pusher and the guy pulls double hoppers in SD and is licensed for, I believe 105k, but most of the driving the truck sees with those loads is on a 100mile round trip on 4lane roads.

2nd problem is a battery drain issue, the owner said during warm weather he has no problems, but during cold weather the batteries will be dead after sitting for a day. He pulled all the fuses out one time to see if that would stop the battery drain but after sitting for a day without any of the fuses in the battery still went dead. Right now he has a battery power disconnect switch installed to keep the batteries from being drained over night. He said the truck has did this since he bought it, even after putting new batteries in.

These two issues scared me into walking away from a decent deal on this truck, but I thought if the issues might be something easy and not really expensive to fix I would try to dicker the price down more to cover the repairs since the rest of the truck is in really good shape.

 

it's hard to get out of gear and grinds going into the next gear. On most trucks I've driven I could put light pressure on the shifter and when I let off the throttle the tranny drops out of gear and then pull it towards the next gear and it will fall right in when the RPM's are correct. On this truck I had to use alot of pressure to get it out of gear and most of the time I would have to pull so hard that when it came out of gear it would hit the gear below and grind. Downshifting wasn't much better, it was very touchy about going into gear and would grind most of the time. I'll admit I'm not a master at shifting and grind the gears occasionally, but I usually can jump into an unfamiliar truck and know how it likes to be shifted after a couple of complete up/down cycles of the gears. I took this truck on a long test drive and absolutely could not figure it out. No matter what I tried the thing would not shift smooth.


The truck has been in service for just over 5yrs, so there is no warrany left on it. The owner hasn't changed the lube in the tranny yet, he just checks it to make sure it isn't low. So the fluid definately needs to be changed, but it does still have the correct syn 50 weight in it.

 

I ran the VIN through International and found out that in the first 180k the truck had 12 claims that were all electrical, one was for a no start issues and the starter was replaced.

 

How big and expensive of a job is it to replace the shift forks in the trans?