[T3] Noisy Tranny

[Jim Adney]

On 25 Sep 2023 at 19:58, Keith Park wrote:

> ItTMs a freeway flyer, I think they changed 3rd and 4th, I know 4th is
> lower.

Don't you mean higher? But there are not a lot of possibilities available. I'd 
expect a FF to require a different R/P.

> they shipped it back to me in a cardboard box so the input shaft could have
> taken A hit and damaged the bearing or it was shot to begin with. 

Yeah, who knows what that might cause. It would be so easy to bolt a 2x4 
with a hole in it across the bell housing to protect the input shaft.

There are SO MANY possibilities of things that can go wrong. For example, 
do you KNOW that you got all your original tranny case parts back? If not, 
they may not be a matched set. Or maybe something simply came loose, 
because it wasn't properly tightened or locked in place.  

A careful reading of the tranny chapter in the brown Bentley is daunting, 
frustrating, and scary. It explains why so few rebuilds get done correctly. 
Frankly, it's just too tempting to take shortcuts and hope no one notices.

Simple rebuilds, that include replacements of bearings and sync. rings are 
easy, and can be done with normal care, but the minute you start replacing 
anything else, the effort skyrockets. Even with the factory jigs, replacing the 
R/P may take a half dozen tries, by someone who actually knows what he's 
doing. Double that if you're trying to use used or mismatched parts, which is 
probably a bad idea in the first place. Plus, there's more than one nose 
cone, and they can't be mixed and matched.

It's not that no one can do it right, it's just that it's not possible to charge 
enough to make it commercially viable, except for the most mundane jobs.

Keith, you and I both expect factory reliability out of our cars. For 
transmissions, I believe there are only three ways to do this: find a suitable 
factory transmission that fits your needs, find someone who is willing and 
able to do the job for a small fortune, or, to be sure about it, buy or build the 
tools and parts necessary to do it yourself. The first option is generally 
cheap, but hard or impossible to find, and I doubt the viability of the second 
option; that game is rigged against you. The third option is reliable, but only 
after a couple of failures, due to the learning curve, plus it's both expensive 
and time consuming.

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Jim Adney, jadney at vwtype3.org
Madison, Wisconsin, USA
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