Skoda Rally Blog

The Ibiza had been up on stands for months.  Actually, over a year, if I’m honest.  Life has got in the way for the most part, but in addition the heavy rain at the beginning of the year meant I didn’t do much on the car for several months.  However, over the Summer I finally got everything back together – the gearbox eventually got built, despite several problems:

1)  The diff from Gripper took longer than expected to arrive; it was a month after the original date that they actually had them in stock, although once they were it was delivered in days, set up to my preference!

2) The gearbox rebuild parts were a LOT of grief – I ordered several parts from autogear.co.uk and many of them were wrong; the bearings mostly were OK, but not all of them – the diff bearings were wrong, and the oil seals were the wrong size (more on this later), and they sent a 3rd gear synchro which didn’t fit; it looked about right until you took a close look, and this was a problem exacerbated by VW saying these parts were no longer available.  Fortunately Jim Jones had an 02A box that had suitable parts in it, so I had a decent set of synchros at last.  It didn’t help that Royal Mail lost the synchros I returned so I’m currently £50 down as they’ve not paid out on the insurance claim yet, months later!

3) Cleaning the cases out took a lot longer than the Skoda ones as they have a lot more places for grit and gunk to hide.  While they look great after being blasted, it is a LOT of work.

Actually building the box was pretty easy as the VW manual is very good.  What wasn’t good was my lack of knowledge of VW driveshafts and flanges.  I was unaware that there are two types (push-in and bolt-in) and I had the wrong type (push-in) for the gripper diff, and in addition the cases use different seals and a spacer if you have different flanges.  Getting hold of the right ones for the diff proved hard, so instead I had my current ones modified by Retel EMD – Damian has provided most of my modified parts, and always does a great job, so here’s the article in question:

Flange

The bit to the right needed to be removed (the spring clip and the small splined bit), as well as a hole drilled for the bolt to go through the centre.  Apparently this flange is made of incredibly hard material and it was bloody hard work to get it done…. but there you go!  Once all modified and with the right seals, it bolted up without issue.  Splendid.

Now it was finally all together and ready to bolt to the engine and then drop into place:

In it goes!

Fitting it here was easy enough – particularly with the removable front panel – but getting the mountings in place was fun – the gearbox mounts are quite complex (it looks as if VW made a bunch of odd bits to make the mountings, it’s a bizarre jigsaw) and I didn’t pay much attention to them when I took them apart… over a year before.  An hour’s head-scratching and finding a missing part led to it all being in place at last.  Splendid.

Next, it was time to sort out the issues of cooling that it suffered – the radiator issues have been mentioned before, but there’s the plumbing to address for it, and that’ll be next.