Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2014 21:41:20 -0700
Reply-To: Tom Young <tomyoung1@COMCAST.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Tom Young <tomyoung1@COMCAST.NET>
Subject: Maybe this is the cause of poor shifting in my air-cooled Westy?
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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