Cranking sound coming from gearbox, unable to shift to first and second gear

[bigcruisinglife]

Hello all,

I've bought 2009 Urban Cruiser 1.4 D-4D last year and recently had some problems so I'm wondering is this something normal or should I be concerned.

Initial problem:

I had gearbox problems where my car would sometimes refuse to shift to the first gear. After driving the car with this problem, it became worse and I couldn't shift to first gear at all. It turned out that the problem was the teeth of the first gear (the thingy where synchro ring comes when gears are changed, I'm not sure what is the correct name of this part since I'm not native English speaker).

Solution:

After the part was changed, I could shift to the first gear, but only when the car was at a full stop. Otherwise, although I could shift to the first gear, cranking noise could be heard so I tried to avoid this as much as possible. My mechanic told me that this is expected behavior because shifting to first gear should only be done when at a full stop (which sounded kind of wrong).

Current problem:

Today I encountered similar problem where I sometimes can't shift to both first and second gear (from either full stop or driving and shifting to second). To "fix" this I have to shift the gear to the reverse and then try shifting back to first or second gear. When doing this, sometimes I couldn't shift to reverse from the first try so I had to shift to neutral beforehand. The behavior is not consistent enough for me to have some conclusions, I will test few more scenarios and try to reproduce everything because I'm not sure what is causing the gearbox to sometimes allow me to shift to first and second gear and sometimes not.

Question:

I'm wondering whether the gearbox problems are normal for Urban Cruiser cars (considering that the car is from 2009) or could it be that the repair of the initial problem wasn't done correctly? Is shifting to first gear while driving (e.g. 10 km/h) known "problem" for this car (I know some cars can shift to first gear when driving at low speeds)? Are there any known issues of the gearbox (since the car is from 2009)? When I mention this problem to a mechanic, I'm getting a response that there is a known issue with gearbox on 1.4 engines, or that there is a known issue with gearbox itself on Urban Cruisers and Yaris cars. Since I'm not educated enough to know what could be the problem described above, I'm asking you for opinions. What could be the cause of the problem in this case?