Technical Archives
Technical Archives
This page was last updated on $Date: 1999/01/07 01:58:20 $.
It appears from the traffic on this list lately that not much is going on with Healey people. I suppose many Healeys are sitting out the winter and their owners are driving the family rice burner.
In order to generate a little traffic before everyone unsubscribes, I've decided to write a running narrative of a transmission repair job. My BJ7's transmission has a mild grind going from 3rd to 4th and from 3rd into 2nd. I've decided to pull it and replace the necessary synchro rings and anything else it needs. I'll post a little something now and then as the job progresses.
After reading Roger Moment's article in the November A-H Magazine, I decided to pull the transmission out through the passenger compartment vs dropping it beneath the car. Since he did an excellent job of detailing this task, I won't bore you with my interpretation of it. I generally followed his instructions with a couple of exceptions. One, I had to remove the drive shaft completely to allow the transmission to slide back far enough to clear the pilot bearing and clutch. Two, I used a different method to support the weight of the transmission while removing it.
Rather than support it from beneath the car, I suspended it from above. I placed two floor jacks (yes I have two, the $30 Chinese types) inside the car, one on each side of the transmission with the business ends forward. I then placed an oak 2" X 2" X 36" across both jacks crossing over the transmission just aft of the bell housing. I tied the 2 X 2 to the jacks with some rope and then suspended the transmission from the 2 X 2 with another piece of rope. I could then raise the jacks enough to take the weight off while sliding the jacks and transmission towards the rear of the car.
Once free of the clutch and turned sideways on the floor of the car, my daughter and I lifted it out of the car. I then degreased it and it's now up on my workbench sans bell housing. Took maybe four hours working alone. That doesn't count the time I spent running in the house to warm up (no heat in the garage).
When I get it apart, I'll submit another chapter.
On the subject of getting it apart, does anyone know how to get the drive gear out of the transmission (center shift transmission)? My Bentley manual is silent as the lawyers say on how to remove this part. The drive gear is actually the shaft that sticks out of the front of the transmission. It has a gear on the rear end of it, the only part of it that resides inside the transmission. It appears that once the bell housing is off, this gear and it's bearing as a unit should just pull out of the transmission. Don't see anything holding it in but it's in there good. I welcome any advice. Thanks.
Last night I started the dissection of the BJ7 transmission. First thing I did was to build a jig out of a couple pieces of 2 X 4 to support the thing on my work bench. If you don't do this it rolls around like a bowling ball.
I drained all of the oil out of it via the plug in the transmission case and the overdrive drain. However, as I later learned, lots of oil stays in there hidden in little caves and other places. The first major job is to remove the overdrive unit. This requires standing the transmission on its head. I set two concrete blocks on the garage floor and couple chunks of 4 X 4 on top of them to provide clearance for the drive gear shaft and place the transmission on them, tail end sticking straight up. A half of cup of oil drizzled out onto the floor.
Next step is to remove the drive shaft flange (propeller flange). The Bentley manual says to remove the flange nut with a socket wrench and a special tool. Luckily I had a 1 1/4" socket. Didn't have the special tool but I do have a pneumatic wrench. After firing up the air compressor and removing the cotter pin, the flange nut was off in seconds. A two jaw gear puller easily pulled the flange off the main drive shaft.
Now to remove the overdrive unit. This also turned out to be easy. Remove the eight nuts that connect the overdrive adapter plate to the transmission case and the over drive unit comes right off. More oil runs out onto the floor. Remove the two large washers that butt up against the main shaft bearing and note position and set aside. Since my overdrive is working fine, I put the overdrive unit in a cardboard box and set it aside.
Muscle what's left of the transmission back up onto its jig on the work bench. More oil runs out on the bench. At this point, I decide that's enough work for the evening. I get out the gasoline and clean up all of the bits and pieces I have as a byproduct of the evenings work. Once cleaned, these go into plastic baggies with a note and sometimes a sketch of where they came from.
I believe in cleaning and bagging parts as I go. I also make a list of anything that needs replacement as I go, such as worn bolts, gaskets, seals, etc.
Finally, a tip. My regular job is a white collar one so I can't go to work with grungy hands. I am a big fan of Goop hand cleaner. You can buy it everywhere. Before I do a dirty job, I rub a little Goop into my hands just like you would cold cream and wipe off the excess with a paper towel. This tends to fill the tiny cracks and crevices in your hands and fingers with Goop so that the black Healey grease can't get in there. After finishing working, more Goop and hot water results in clean hands quickly. I also have a special little brush designed to clean finger nails. Smeared with Goop, it cleans black Healey grime out quickly.
Worked some more last night and now have the transmission pretty much disassembled. The rear shaft (main drive?) was a real bear to get out. It's bearing is pressed into a bearing carrier which in turn is pressed into the transmission case. I'm sure there is a special tool to extract this thing but I have no idea of what it even looks like. I made up something using some scrap angle material and a couple of long #8 screws and pulled this critter out of the case. Took an hour or so.
But once it was out I was home free. I knocked the drive gear out of the case using a piece of a broom handle (Bentley says to use a brass drift). At this point I still need to disassemble the main gear cluster to get at the 2nd gear baulking ring. I'll do that this weekend. I took a quick look at the suspect 4th gear baulking ring and it is badly worn compared to it's 3rd gear counterpart.
Have a Happy New Year.Over the New Years break, I finished disassembling the transmission on my BJ7. It's sort of like taking apart a clock. Lots of bits and pieces that look like they can go together any number of ways but only one way is right. Unless you do this for a living, you have to go very slowly and take notes and make sketches. There are also a couple of traps. On both the 1st-2nd and 3rd-4th shifting mechanisms, there are three spring loaded bearings used for detent purposes that explode when the mechanism is taken apart. If not careful, at least one of these bearings will shoot off into space and disappear into a dark and rarely visited part of your garage.
Upon close inspection, the only new parts I needed were the 2nd gear and 4th gear baulk rings (synchromesh rings) which is exactly what I expected and hoped for when I started the job. Although the 3rd gear ring had minimal wear, I decided to replace all three. After comparing prices between Victoria British and A-H Spares in England, I ordered the three rings from A-H Spares and the seals and gaskets from Victoria British. Should have all the parts in about 10-12 days at which time I'll put it all back together.
One other surprise I found was that the 2nd gear ring was so badly worn that it was allowing the 1st-2nd gear shifter to travel so far when shifting to 2nd that the shifter, which is made of brass, was hitting 2nd gear itself. This was resulting in 2nd gear eating away at the shifter. Although little damage was done to the shifter, it contaminates the transmission oil with brass which can't be good for things in general and the overdrive unit in particular.
In my previous post on my transmission repair job, I ended by saying that I had ordered the parts. I ordered the three synchro rings from A-H Spares in England and the seals and gaskets from Victoria British here. I ordered all this stuff on January 2nd.
The seals came about a week ago and I installed them in about 15 minutes. The synchro rings arrived last Saturday the 13th. BTW, total cost for the rings including air mail shipping from England was $72. The Victoria British price for the rings is $129 not including shipping.
I installed the rings in their appropriate places and reassembled the main body of the transmission yesterday. The two shaft assemblies are a very tight fit into the transmission case. I'd call it a press fit. To make this job easy, I placed the case in the kitchen oven and heated it to 150 degrees F for an hour. I placed the two shaft assemblies in the freezer for a few hours. When the assemblies were good and cold and the case quite warm, I stuck them together with ease. There was even a few seconds that I could've removed them and stuck them back in again. The lay shaft and all of its needle bearings was quite an effort to get back in place but eventually that was accomplished and the all the difficult stuff has now been completed.
Next, the overdrive unit and the bell housing need to be reattached to the transmission and we're close to being done.
At the end of the last chapter in this saga I had reassembled the main body of the transmission. It was ready to mate with the OD unit and the bell housing. I thought I was close to being done. Not so.
Since there was nothing wrong with the OD unit, I didn't mess with it. I just set it aside and assumed it would slide right back on the transmission main shaft when I was ready for it. Nope. I examined the OD unit careful before I attempted to reattach it to the transmission and saw two things that concerned me. First, the roller on top of the oil pump plunger didn't look like it would clear the oil pump cam when the OD unit was slid over the main shaft and careful measurements confirmed this. Secondly, the roller clutch had drifted out of alignment with the planet carrier. When these two parts are aligned perfectly, the splines on the transmission main shaft pass through them. If either rotates a few degrees and the other doesn't, then said shaft will only go through the first but not the second. You have to align them before you go any further.
The oil pump problem was solved by compressing the plunger spring and holding it in that position. I did this with a piece of .020" aviation safety wire that I looped around the top coil of the spring and then fed both ends down through a hole where the oil pump strainer is normally located. I compressed the spring and then took the slack out of the safety wire and tied it around a piece of wood dowel that spanned the strainer compartment. Aviation safety wire is stainless steel and very strong. The .020" stuff is also very flexible, almost like nylon fish line. Later when the OD unit was bolted to the transmission case, I cut the safety wire and pulled it out of the OD unit.
The other problem was a little more difficult. Turns out that the roller clutch will rotate quite easily (in a counter clockwise direction only). And it had. I have no idea how. I needed to rotate it a few more degrees to align it with the planet carrier. I built a little tool to do this. I welded a piece of sheet steel, about 1/2" X 1 1/4" to the end of a steel rod that measured 3/8" X 12". I welded a little bar on the other end so I could turn it. I then inserted the tool down into the bowels of the OD unit and turned the roller clutch until it was aligned with the planet carrier. Actually this was quite easy once I had the tool.
Next I replaced the flange that the drive shaft bolts to back on the OD output shaft so I could stand the OD unit up on end. Now I could look down into it innards. I then picked up the transmission and holding it vertically, slid its main shaft down into the OD unit. You have to rotate the main shaft until it drops into the planet carrier/roller clutch. Replace the nuts and washers that hold the OD unit to the transmission case and you're basically done with this end. (Actually, it wasn't quite this easy.)
We're almost done. I replaced the striking (shifting) forks, safety wired their locking screws and closed the main case. One thing I noticed while inside the transmission was that the 3rd/4th striking fork was travelling too far when 4th gear was engaged. This allowed the fork to strike the gear itself which resulted in the gear grinding some meat off the fork. To correct this, I replaced a pad in the bell housing that limits the travel of the striking fork rod with a thicker one. Finally, I replaced the bell housing and I was done. Now I have to go find a nice neighbor to help me muscle the thing back into the car.
Two words of warning spring to mind at this point. First, the transmission, even without the OD unit and the bell housing is quite heavy. If you have a bad back or aren't into messing around with heavy slipery, machinery, I wouldn't mess with it. Also, the transmission contains more parts than the space shuttle and if you don't take careful notes as you disassemble it, you and all the kings horses and all the kings men won't be able to put it back together again.
It finally warmed up enough so that I could finish the transmission job. I've had it ready to go back into the BJ7 for a couple of weeks but it's been too cold out in my garage to crawl around on that cold concrete.
But it warmed up nice Super Bowl Sunday so I asked a neighbor to help me hoist the thing back into the car. He stuck around long enough to help me get all of the bell housing bolts in. He then took off and I finished it up. Took three hours from the time he showed up until I test drove it. The idea of suspending the transmission from above using the two floor jacks made for an easy installation. The drive gear shaft slid through the clutch and home effortlessly.
Bottom line is that it no longer grinds going into any gear and has a nice solid feel. Total cost was less than $80. This included three new synchro rings and two seals. Probably took me around 12-15 man-hours to do the whole job. I'm sure an experienced mechanic could do it in half the time but my time is cheap. I didn't replace the clutch release bearing or the rubber mounts as they are relatively new.
I didn't get a completely overhauled transmission for $80 but I now know that there is nothing significantly wrong with it, it works fine and should give me many years of trouble free service.
Please send comments, additions, and errors for the SOL Healey web pages to Bob Haskell.
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