well let the fun begin.
picked up this truck from a buddy who's been driving it for the past year.
basically the truck won't go into neutral. you can shift gears and when you let the ( very very bad clutch ) (it was his first manual ) but when you let the clutch out you can tell your in different gears with the amount of gas you have to give it to move.

so first thing I read was taking off the shifter (handle thing) and moving it back into neutral with a screw driver. so we spent about an hour moving them and having a buddy push the truck but the "forks" as people like to call them look just like everyone's pictures of "neutral" but the truck is still in gear when you push it.

so now the questions.
any chance in the world a very bad clutch could cause this?
is it time for the tranny shop?
anything else I can try ?

all positive feed back is very much appreciated

 

Welcome to the forum

What you describe is a sheared roll pin on one the the shift rails, which is not hard to fix but you do need to remove the top of the transmission.

You should have an M5OD-R1 transmission in a 1990 2.3l Ranger

There are 3 shift rails
1/2
3/4
5/reverse

each rail has a slot for shifter, held to that rail with a roll pin, these are what you see after you remove the shifter and look down in the hole.
And yes, when the 3 of these are in the center and aligned then trans should be in neutral and truck should roll
When you move one of these slots the shift RAIL should move with it, so see if you can put a mark on each shift rail then push or pull on its slot to make sure RAIL is moving

and each rail has a shift fork held to that rail by a roll pin.
When you move shifter to one side and push it forward or backward that shift rail's shift fork slides "dog gear" forward or backward to engage the selected gear.

Shift forks seen here: M5OD-Forks.jpg Photo by DPDISXR4Ti | Photobucket

This is the top cover flipped upside down, you can see the roll pins in the shift forks

There could be other issues as well but with the top of the trans removed you will be able to see more.

Now it is best to remove the transmission, but you could remove carpet and maybe seats and cut floor out a bit to get access to remove the top.

roll pin fix is very cheap, just lot of work.

they shear off because people try to force gear changes