Hi Everyone!
I recently purchased a 2009 Mazda 3 Sedan as my first car so I can learn how to drive stick and learn more about performing basic maintenance on my own. For the most part, the car has been great and I absolutely love it! One issue that I have had for quite some time is, whenever I try to shift into the reverse gear, the shifter has a tendency to half engage the reverse gear. But the shifter never pops out of gear and if I apply more force to the shifter, it feels like it's fully into the reverse position, but it's not. It's just stuck there. When this happens and I let off of the clutch, I begin to hear a "whiny" noise and the reverse gear doesn't engage. Once this happens, I push the clutch in again and then push the stick further into reverse again, then it fully moves into the reverse position and the car backs up without an issue. I've attached a video to better outline this:
https://youtu.be/RWlRijpXZMI
One thing I have been trying is shifting the car into the first gear before shifting it into reverse to see if that helps the problem, however this doesn't always seem to work. I also make sure the car is fully stopped and isn't rolling whenever I do try to change into reverse. The car has 163,000km on it and I don't think the transmission fluid has ever been flushed/changed. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what could be wrong? Or is this common to manual gearboxes? This does not seem to happen in any other gear. I have been unable to find much information on Google regarding this issue.
Thank you for your help!