Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2014 22:04:40 -1000
Reply-To: "SDF ( aka ;jim lahey' - Scott )" <scottdaniel@TURBOVANS.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: "SDF ( aka ;jim lahey' - Scott )" <scottdaniel@TURBOVANS.COM>
Organization: Cosmic Reminders
Subject: Re: Maybe this is the cause of poor shifting in my air-cooled
Westy?
In-Reply-To: <000601cfddfb$1cea2330$56be6990$@comcast.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
I worked on someone's 84 Westy with original trans.. ( like 150+K miles )
that always had somewhat stiff/sticky shifting.
I got the shift linage to be Hyper smooth and nice..
and in two weeks it was stiff again.
yep ...rebuilt trans fixed it just fine.
it can be the internals of the trans.
On 10/1/2014 6:41 PM, Tom Young wrote:
> Hi all:
>
>
>
> I've been struggling with poor shifting, i.e., it's difficult to "find" 1st
> and 2nd gear. A couple of weeks ago I pulled the entire shifter mechanism
> out of the vehicle, (that's the gear shift lever and the bearings), and
> noted that it was pretty "sticky", so I swapped in the shifter mechanism
> from my old Vanagon which was a lot smoother. Unfortunately that didn't
> cure things. In the meantime I've pulled apart the Westy shifter mechanism,
> cleaned everything and greased it up with moly disulfide. It's slick as
> snot now (to use the technical term) and I'll re-install it later, but I
> know that's not going to change things.
>
>
>
> So today I pulled everything related to shifting out of the vehicle and
> started to look at the bits. From front to back:
>
>
>
> 1) The "horns" on the front selector shaft look fine to me. I've
> posted a few shots of this portion of the front selector shaft at
> http://1drv.ms/1xDiHMh . The shaft from the Westy is at the top of the
> first 3 pictures and the shaft from my old Vanagon - which had no shifting
> issues - is at the bottom. If anyone disagrees with my assessment here I'd
> appreciate the feedback.
>
> 2) The bushing through which the middle selector shaft passes, (that's
> the one above the gas tank), also looks fine, looking at it from above the
> spare tire. I'll see if I can't clean and re-lube it using some dowels and
> rags, but I doubt that has anything to do with the shifting problems.
>
> 3) The two bushings used to connect the front and middle selector
> shafts are intact. The articulation between the shafts seems a little
> sticky, but since these bushings are NLA I'm afraid to try and pull the
> shafts apart; I broke the top bushing on the Vanagon linkage doing that, not
> realizing these were "soft parts". Can the shafts be separated without
> breaking these bushings?
>
> 4) At the rear the guide pin seems to be perfectly OK. The only part
> that had had any obvious wear was the top ball of the shift bracket (part
> 251-711-219); there's a pair of pretty obvious flat spots on the ball on the
> sides facing the transmission and facing away from the transmission. You
> can see a couple of shots of the shift bracket at the same link as above.
> The straight on shot of the shift bracket shows that the top ball is about
> 1mm smaller in diameter than the bottom ball. The second shot shows the
> size of the flat spot itself.
>
>
>
> I hate to be a parts replacer without a pretty good understand that
> replacing the part will fix things. I just don't have a good enough
> understanding of the entire shift mechanism to say with any confidence that
> these flat spots are the source of the shifting problem. Does anybody have
> an opinion, one way or the other?
>
>
>
> Tom Young
>
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