If your TR3 has the original non-synchro first gear DON'T DO IT! You'll
break the first layshaft gear. I speak from bitter personal experience.
When I bought my first TR3 in the early '80's, the fellow sold it
because it had this precise problem. At that time, junkyard gearboxes
for these cars were pretty easy to come by. I went through three of
them, and every single one had the broken first gear. I'd get them home
and drain the oil and get a hand full of teeth. Finally, my dad took the
broken gear to a tool and die maker and actually had it repaired. The
fellow said, "I don't know, that's pretty soft..." It lasted about 6
months and broke again. I drove that car that way for quite some time
before I finally coughed up the then-astronomical sum of $100 for a new
gear and had no further problems (with the gearbox, anyway).
Flash forward to modern times and my current TR3. I'm getting ready to
pull out of of the local coffee-shop parking lot into traffic, and I let
out the clutch. Bang! crunch, crunch, crunch... I knew EXACTLY what the
problem was-- the first layshaft gear had broken. I had just overhauled
this gearbox myself about six months earlier, and everything looked
fine. This time the replacement gear was about $250, a lot of cursing
and a couple of smashed fingers. The new gear said "Made in Italy," but
oddly, I've had no further trouble
Gears with synchromesh are helical cut, in other words, slanted teeth.
This makes the gear run quieter, but more importantly, more than one
tooth is in contact at any given time. Non-synchro gears are straight
cut, so they are noisy, but only one tooth at a time is in contact. Our
torquey little TR are engines are sometime too much for them, and of
course, 1st and reverse have the highest torque of all.
So I beseech you, implore you, go easy in first gear. Keep it under 3000
rpm, 3500, max. That's all the faster I was going when my gear broke.
As for all this stuff about breaking in the engine itself, gosh, I don't
know.
Bryan Reese
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