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Date:         Sun, 21 Sep 2014 20:06:18 -0700
Reply-To:     Tom Young <tomyoung1@COMCAST.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Tom Young <tomyoung1@COMCAST.NET>
Subject:      Poor shifting: air-cooled Westy
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

Hi all:

Some background:

I bought this Westy several years ago and noted that getting into 1st, 2nd and reverse was just slightly difficult. Not horrible, just not as easy as the sifting I experience with the air-cooled Vanagon I owned at the same time. Since I had a fairly new AA Transaxle rebuild in the Vanagon and was intending to get rid of it, I swapped the rebuilt transmission into the Westy. Nothing changed as far as the shifting went so I've always put that down to some slight imperfection in the shifting setup. In fact, up until a couple of weeks ago I blamed that problem on what I thought was a missing bushing - the one that lives over the gas tank - because there always seemed to be a rattle somewhere in the shifting mechanism that I could quiet down by putting my hand on the shifter.

The shifting turned dramatically worse 2 or 3 weeks ago so I figured it was time to fix that "missing" bushing. Only thing is when I finally dropped the belly pan that guards the gas-fired heater and got a look at the bushing, it was in place and looked to be in good condition, looking at it over the gas tank. (You can see photos of it here http://tinyurl.com/nwjmhdc ).

I removed the shifter and bearing plate assembly and the whole thing seemed rather gunky and sticky so I replace the shifter and bearing plate with one that I had salvaged from the old Vanagon, and did the 2-step linkage adjustment specified by all the books. Only, that didn't help at all. I'm really fighting to get into 1st, but I'm not getting any indication, noise-wise or feel-wise, that it's a transmission problem.

I suppose one of the 3 shifter rods could have somehow gotten bent, but that seems very unlikely and, in any case, I certain nothing happed in that regard 2 or 3 weeks ago.

Anybody have some other thoughts as to the problem here?

Tom Young


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