fraggle

I feel like I'm living on borrowed time, has anyone found a reasonable centering spring? IF I'm stuck I'm stuck, but if it's reasonable I'll buy one now and plan some maintenance.

SQLGuy

Post #25. Or are you saying, "...more reasonable than $150..."? (For a theoretically more reliable spring.)

fraggle

Colin, are these $150 jobbies still available?

westija

Reviving this thread.

928 S4 1989 5 Speed. My shifter is very wobbly and it seems the spring is not holding it into position and shifting is very imprecise and annoying lately.

I have done some research and suspect it is the 928 303 034 09 Centering Spring mentioned here.

Questions for those experienced folks here:
1. How do I know if the spring is the problem and not the shifter coupler "nylon" (?) bushing? Or the compression spring in the shifter itself (928 424 147 03)?
2. How hard is it to replace the Centering Spring? Do I have to remove the tranny? Any advices?
3. If I have a bad Centering Spring and switch to the Lizard Short Shifter, does it get much better to the point I can live with a broken spring?

Thanks in advance

Vilhuer

'89 MY spring lower end isn't held in place by anything when its upper end is gone like they tend to do. This means it can move around and possibly get between gears killing entire gearbox. It really isn't option to leave it in and keep on driving even if upper end comes out with oil.

GregBBRD

Very good advice, from someone that has, no doubt, seen the results of these spring pieces "going through" the gears.

Pretty much turns a usable gearbox into a few spare parts for some else's gearbox.

dprantl

First you need to make sure all the plastic bushings in the shift system are good. That would be the front one, rear ones (also make sure the bolt holding the shaft is tight) and the ones by the shifter. If all of them are good, then you should start to worry that there is something wrong inside the transmission.

Dan
'91 928GT S/C 475hp/460lb.ft

fraggle

Well, my last post in this thread was two years ago and mine still works... For now.

Any replacements or stuck out there?

Joe, if your sifter bushings have not been replaced I would bet on that first.

ROG100

I sell the Lizard spring with no known issues as of now.
Other parts are available spring is not.

Cortina

Am I missing something with this suggestion : Replace entire shift mechanism with the "old style" (ie pre BW syncros) springs and control "mechanism".

I have not tried it - but have stripped both types of box (only rebuilt BW type) , but from memory it looked like a workable swap !

Is it ?

z driver 88t

I will be installing Lizard's (Colin's) spring next week, just purchased from Roger. There are a LOT of threads out there on this already. Do a search.

As for using the mechanism from the pre-BW gear boxes, if you have them disassembled I beleive it is doable. But it requires a lot of swap over from what has been posted before.

There have been various repairs and fabrications done as one-off projects by at least four people on the forum, none of which are commercially available. Colin's is the only game in town for now.

This thread and its links summarizes the current state of affairs pretty well:
https://rennlist.com/forums/928-foru...-question.html

I will be documenting the install and aftermath as well as I can and report any failures. Unfortunatley from what I have gathered, although there are 11 of Colin's springs in various cars around the world, none on Rennlist.

Vilhuer

Ideal solution would be to replace every possible factory system with external setup mounted to front end of gearbox. There is space for it but setup isn't simple to make as selector shaft moves.

Cortina

[QUOTE= But it requires a lot of swap over from what has been posted before.

[/QUOTE]

I have no idea what this means ? (unless there is a pause after over )

z driver 88t

Erkka - That idea would be great. One of the guys who PM'd me when I was going through my dilemma said he had thought about this but was able to obtain one of the last OEM springs as a replacement so he didn't have to go that route. At least one person has fabricated something like this (maybe on the Reutterwerks forum?) I read so many threads on this subject when mine broke that they all blur together now, but there were no details or pictures. It would be the best solution though.

Cortina - What I meant was - Someone had posted before in one of the old threads a question as to whether or not the later BW style spring could be used in the early gear boxes. The answer (I believe posted by Greg Brown) was that to use the BW type spring in an early gear box required significant disassembly and swapping of parts over from the BW trans to the early trans (i.e. not just the spring and preselector lever). It would therefore stand to reason that the answer to your question would be the same, but backwards. In otherwords, to use the old-style centering spring in a newer trnas would require a significant swap over of parts from the pre-BW trans to the BW trans.

However, at this point in looking at all the posts on this subject which date back to about 2010 when the BW style centering spring became NLA no one has posted that they have attempted the swap you described, of using an early style spring in a late style gearbox. Hope that makes sense.

z driver 88t

Erkka - to build on your idea, I was wondering how other transaxle cars do it and I searched for aftermarket corvette shifters.

The C5 and C6 have a centering spring that is internal to the transaxle, however, the aftermarket shifters have supplemental centering springs built into the base of the shifter assembly to provide supplemental centering force.

It would seem like at some point the ingenious fabricators within the 928 community may come up with something functionally similar which as an added bonus could potentially work for all the manual transmissions.



http://www.vetteweb.com/tech/vemp_07...31846230007859