Skoda Rally Blog

Doing any kind of a job can give you pleasure, but doing one really well is definitely a step above that, and this time round I was hoping that the gearbox would be as good as it’s realistically possible to be. To that end, lots of new parts have been bought, so it has new bearings throughout, new seals, and as already seen the cases are looking nearly new, they’re that clean. Even new bolts have been bought at great expense (well, £4.50).

However, building one of these gearboxes isn’t just a ‘put it back together’ job, and the reason for that is simple – the diff and the gearkit are different sizes to the original parts, meaning that the gearbox has to be carefully ‘shimmed’ to get all the clearances right, and in addition some parts of the casing need to be ground away to provide room for the new internals – in this case there is a bit of grinding needed for the diff to fit in place – the cases will go together without, but it won’t turn. So that took an hour or so to sort out, and the same for the gearbox where 4th gear is a LOT bigger than standard. Once all that was done, it was just a case of measuring what size shims were needed, and fortunately due to my previous habit of destroying standard gearboxes, I had all the right bits. Before the cases went together, this is what it looked like:

The rest was just bolt together stuff, no problems really. Gearboxes are odd things – they’re an essential part of a car (and even more so in a tuned car), and in theory they are quite simple. But they seem to be (particularly ‘performance’ ones) a massive source of grief for many people with all sorts of horror stories of failures – including my own. But you never know 100% until it’s in the car, so here’s hoping that all is well…