Part 24

Finally!

After two solid days of thrashing on the primary transmission, we finally got it together.  It's not assembled exactly per the service manual, but the manuals are so poorly written that it's impossible to follow them exactly.  There are a few parts left over but that's normal, right?

Our initial plan was to finish up the assembly of the gear section, then look into whether we were going to have to re-clock the shift rods or not.  The latter is the most delicate part of this whole deal; if we screw them up, we could be out of a primary transmission for the next race which was just two weeks away.

Getting the gear section together turned out to be the easy part, as we predicted.  Re-clocking the shift rods turned out to be pretty easy too, as they matched the originals perfectly and worked with the 2nd gen shifter linkage.  The problem turned out to be with final assembly of the transmission case.  Every time we tightened down the housing bolts and the front cover, we could not get the input shaft to turn, even in neutral.  It also would not shift into most gears without twisting the input shaft back and forth.

We proceeded to spend the rest of the weekend assembling and disassembling the damn thing probably a dozen times to varying degrees, trying to figure out what was causing the binding.  We went through a tube and a half of sealant because every time we thought we had it sorted out, we re-applied the stuff only to have to tear it down again.  What a waste...

We found that the thing that was really causing the problem was tightening down the front cover.  We ended up isolating the cause down to too much axial load on the input shaft bearing.  In layman's terms, the front cover was pushing in on the bearing, loading it up and causing too much friction. 

We ended up having to remove a retaining ring and pressing the bearing further onto the input shaft.  We put the cover back on and the binding was gone.  The only problem is, now we can't put the retaining ring back on!

So the question is, have we built a transmission that's sure to fail, or have we custome-built one of the most reliable, race-ready transmissions money can('t) buy? 

We'll find out next weekend...