Leap of faith

Now we've been here before. Put the gearbox together a while ago now and I thought I had done a decent job. So much so that I stuck the thing in the van. A test drive last week showed that wasn't the case. So now, its a debugging process. Trying to work out what is wrong without re-installing the gearbox. This is very much in line with my dayjob - fixing and updating software.


Anyway here are the symptoms:

• hard to engage gear
• doesn't stay in 3rd
• doesn't stay in 4th
• overdrive is ace!

ok the last one isn't really a symptom.

So the first one was addressed by bleeding the clutch. And it looks like that worked. The other issues were only going to be gearbox out jobs. Which is fine, were it not for the fact that winter is back...

So what could the other problems be? Well the gears are held in by ball bearings on little detent springs. So I got myself a set of new ones and ....

Lo and behold, the new ones (left) are significantly longer than the old ones (middle - 1st/2nd, right - 3rd/4th) but there didn't seem to be that much difference.

So what else could it be ....

Take a look at this ...

It's the 3rd/4th gear selector rod, and the cutouts are what hold the gears in. Now those cutouts are kinda in the middle. But they're not, so it only goes in one way. What if... what if it was the wrong way round? One switcharoo later (and a few ball bearings fired round the garage) and its in the right way, and 3rd/4th has some proper resistance.

Superb, now its just the leap of faith of fitting it back in the van to see if it really works. Watch this space...