Stripping the Gearbox

On Saturday I headed into a unseasonably wet Springs to collect a 5 speed T9N gearbox from Joe's Scrapyard. The only one they had came out of a Cortina 3.0l bakkie so I am thinking the first gear is gonna be a little short. But hey, there's only one available so R4500 later I am on my way home. It has a short input shaft and no gearlever so I cannot test if it even has all its gears.

Sunday morning and first thing I do is head for Autozone and get me some decent circlip pliers.

The gearbox came with a bell housing which is a massive bit of metal, including the clutch lever and thrust washer. Some fiddling about trying to remove the lever with no joy, so I hold the lever forward while I bash the thrust washer backward. Success. Those two bits come out and now 4 bolts are holding the housing to the gearbox. So out with the impact wrench and 10 seconds later the housing is off.

Now at least I can manoeuver the box around.

First off is the top cover and I tip out all the oil into the bucket. The oil is clear and clean, which is a surprise. Then I notice the gasket off the top cover is liberally covered in RTV, which tells me this box has been opened. Now this can be good, or bad. Good in that it may have been re-conditioned properly, or bad in that some shade tree mack has tried to recondition or repair it, and failed.

I press on, following the Haynes manual I downloaded off the net. The box comes apart slowly and the plastic container slowly fills up with springs, shafts, blocker bars, circlips and synchro rings. To my surprise, the synchro rings look pretty new, they still have ridges on them, the bearings feel tight and the gears are not worn at all. So the box is in pretty good nick. The only main problems I can see is the selector connector has been badly hacked with a file and the plastic saddle that sits on it has disintegrated. The rear round cover is missing and has been replaced by a "wall" of RTV.

When I get to the very bottom of the case, the magnet is completely covered with fine steel sludge sticking to it. Far more than a gearbox in this condition would suggest, so maybe the previous repair mob didn't clean it up.

The speedo gear must come off  - an engineering firm must help I do not have a big enough puller.

 

I cleaned the parts as I went - I absolutely HATE gear oil. Note to self - get some paraffin!