Skoda Rally Blog

Updates have been a long time coming on the site, this is because for the first time in a couple of years, I’ve been on holiday (snowboarding in France, and also a trip to Italy), and also I’ve been too busy with work to write much up. But I’ve not been slacking off. The engine and gearbox came out of the car several weeks ago, and I’ve stripped the gearbox down to see what was wrong. No, that’s not true, I knew what was wrong, I stripped it down to find the extent of the damage. And what I found was quite bad – the diff casing had entirely broken up, with the one side of the case having split into several large pieces and a lot of small ones.

These pieces had then gone on their merry way, wreaking destruction as they went – as you can imagine, having large pieces of metal flying around inside a gearbox isn’t usually a recipe for a happy ending.

But in this case, amazingly, it wasn’t too bad. The crownwheel and pinion were the only parts of the gearbox to sustain any damage, where a piece of the diff casing had become stuck between them and been crushed, heavily damaging the pinion, but amazingly the gears themselves were undamaged.

This is a good thing as damage to them would have doubled the cost of the repair. Close inspection found that the gearchange mechanism had also suffered some damage internally, the reason for the box feeling jammed in gear, but luckily it was actually in neutral, which had minimised further damage. Clearly 90% of the box is scrap, in fact only the gear kit is going to be retained, but this is a major relief for me – looking at a £800 bill is bad enough, but doubling that price would really have killed me off.

So, the next issue became how to fund the new diff, and that would really mean saving up or selling something. As some of you know, I bought a Hyundai Coupe at Christmas, with the hope of making this a quick project to become a new, fast and cheap replacement for the Skoda, but it had to go as the extra time I’ve needed to spend on the Felicia and the cost means keeping both isn’t an issue. Once this had sold (it went last weekend) it was just a simple phonecall to John from Gripper to order the new diff – this is on its way now. I have the week of the 23rd off, so hopefully I’ll be able to build up the new box then, and then it’s just time to move onto the engine; I’m sure there are a lot of areas that can be improved on the engine when it’s rebuilt, as I know there are several improvements that can be made while still keeping the engine Group A legal, so this will be the next thing to look at.