914 Gearbox Rebuild - Alignment Question

[mikedsilva]

Hoping that some of you who have gearbox experience, can have a look and see if I have this right.

I bought my car earlier this year and had to do a lot of work to get it registered. It was a tailshifter and was horrible to use. Really horrible. Once it was registered, I set about converting to a side shifter....
After doing this, I could drive the car much easier, but now I realised I needed to fix 1st gear (no syncro anymore) and strangely it always popped out of 5th gear. All other gears seemed OK.

So a couple days ago, I pulled the box out again to change sliders, syncros, brake bands etc. I ordered a lot of parts from Mike Lesniak aka Dr Evil.. and he has been really patient with all my questions.

But when I went to put the pinion shaft and driveshaft back together, I got confused with the different thrust washers. There are basically 3 of them with all different levels of bevelling. The really thin one with almost no bevel, belongs with the 1st gear cluster.. no problem.

The other 2 are not quite so easy to discern. I watched the Dr Evil tutorial again and he makes great emphasis about how to not mix them up. But when it comes to selecting one for the pinion shaft (he assembles the pinion shaft first) the video cuts to an assembled shaft, not showing exactly which thrust washer he chose!

Now when I removed everything, I was almost certain that the thicker of the 2 washers, the one with the more pronounced bevel, came from the pinion shaft. But in his video, it looks like he has the thinner washer on the pinion shaft.

So I found a video on youtube from cogs cogs cogs.... about 901 tear down.. it's a 'stop motion" video about pulling a 901 box apart. Now, on that video, it looks like the thicker washer is on the pinion shaft.. and he shows an exploded view of all the parts of the drive shaft, and sure enough it looks like the thinner washer is with the driveshaft assembly.

Cogs Cogs Pinion Shaft.. thicker more bevelled washer



Cogs Cogs Cogs Driveshaft with what looks like to be the THINNER less bevelled washer


Cogs Cogs Cogs Driveshaft parts layed out... thinner washer?



My second issue, is after isntalling the 2 shafts, and torquing everything correctly, there is a very slight misalignment between the gears that are furthest away from the intermediate plate.


The gears closer to the intermediate plate are in somewhat perfect alignment.


Is this correct?

At first I thought that the washers were the wrong way around... ie on the wrong shafts. But after considerable thought, I do not think so. I am pretty sure there is a large spacer separating the end cog, from the middle stack, and so that gap cannot be changed??

Also, here is a pick of my 5th gear slider that came out.. I am pretty sure this is the reason it was popping out of 5th.. Looks like a previous owner swapped the 2/3 slider for the 4/5 slider.. needless to say, all sliders have been replaced.