I was stunned when one of my five brothers asked when we could start disassembling the gearbox for the 1969 Lotus Elan I am restoring. Being the youngest of six boys (if you can still call 50 young), I’m not used to asking my older brothers for help. It’s awkward. They have families and lives of their own, places to go and people to see, and I have too many years to look back on that explain why my favorite colors are black and blue…
I had recently moved the gearbox – an item best known for its duty in the British-built Ford Cortina – to the top shelf of the wire shelving units in my garage. This got it off the floor behind the rolling cart that carries the Elan’s body, and put it within my field of vision whenever I went into the garage. In other words, I couldn’t escape it. Bob – he’s the brother who made the offer – is an engineer at Ford, a career that saw him follow in Dad’s footsteps. He’s a climate control engineer (and a darn good one), and understands things I do not. Things like how a gearbox works, and how to take it apart without making a complete mess of it.
The mainshaft out of the gearbox case
Like Dad, Bob also has a very dry sense of humor, and a quiet yet aloof demeanor that leads you to believe he’s either bored or disinterested – or both. Believe me, he’s neither. And though my brother Bill (third oldest) got me interested in everything Lotus – a love that eventually lead me to a period (1996 through 2000) as the Director of Communications for Lotus Cars USA – it is Bob who has the practical knowledge to help me the most with the restoration of my car. (Plus, unlike the rest, he lives a block away from my house.) In exchange for help, I give Bob my issues of Classic and Sports Car when I’m done reading them. Recently I held on to three issues while he took his time sand blasting the Elan’s rear brake calipers. (He only recently admitted that he had misplaced a few pieces, and didn’t want to proceed before he knew where everything was.) Thankfully they’re back in my garage wearing a nice coat of silver ceramic caliper paint, and Bob has three issues of the magazine to read.
The brakes and the transmission – specifically replacing the gearbox’s aged synchronizers – are all that stand in the way of the Elan being mechanically complete. But, as I have discovered in many instances in my life, the closer you get to the end of a project, the farther you are from completing it. So, I jumped at Bob’s offer of help.
Wednesday July 1 (mark it down on your calendar, I did) was the day we set about pulling the gearbox apart. And, just like our dad would have, Bob insisted that I do the disassembly. Pulling off the bellhousing (aluminum) wasn’t a problem, nor was removing the tailshaft housing. The top cover was a breeze, and soon I was filling marked Ziploc sandwich bags with clusters of parts and taking pictures of assemblies so that we could put them together correctly. But, as it had with Dad, Bob soon took over the disassembly process, easing pieces out of position, telling me what to write on the bags, and holding things in position so I could take a picture. This inevitably lead to him commenting on how someone who had worked at two automotive industry trade magazines (Automotive Industries and Automotive Design & Production) with a deep technical content – thanks, in part, to me – didn’t know how a manual transmission worked. “I didn’t have to write reports on the fundamentals of gearbox design,” I said. “I only had to explain what technologies were used to make them more efficient, less expensive or better.”
You could see the gears in his head working, assessing what I said from his perspective, and processing a reply. And as he tapped the tab back on the locking ring that held the draw nut in place, he briefly straightened up and said: “But how can you write about something you don’t fully understand?” Little did he know that he had stumbled upon the reason I never became either an engineer or a doctor, two things I was encouraged to become in my youth. Writing about things you don’t completely understand isn’t always easy, and I often have relied on Bob to explain how certain mechanisms work to get a better understanding of something I’m writing about. And that morning I had asked him how a manual transmission transfers power from the engine, through the gearbox and out to the driveshaft, with different speeds and – in the case of reverse gear – different directions of travel. Rather than use words, Bob used pictures, and he rotated the shafts and engaged the gears sitting in the gearbox. How the gearbox worked became a little clearer, though initially I stumped him on how reverse gear worked. If the primary gearset rotated one way, transferred this energy to cluster gears that turned the other way, and then sent power to the reverse idler, didn’t that mean the reverse idler gear — and reverse gear itself — was traveling in the same direction as the forward gears? That’s when magic marker was taken to newspaper and a diagram drawn to show the rotations, with a side dissertation on reverse gear’s relationship to the primary gear cluster and how it rotates in the opposite direction. Truthfully, I’m glad I don’t have to design the things, but I happy Bob helped me understand them a bit better.
“I’m still amazed you don’t know this. You might as well have been writing cookbooks for Betty Crocker,” he said with a well-timed pause, “though I’ve tasted your cooking.” Very droll, Bob. And with that we stopped the disassembly process and made our way to a local tool seller to find a suitable dummy shaft for the cluster gears. Tapping the cluster gear shaft out with the dummy shaft would keep the needle bearings it rolls on in place, and allow us to drop the gearset intact into the bottom of the case so that we could get the front part of the mainshaft out. After half an hour searching we found a bin filled with replacement handles for bottle, floor and other types of jacks, and a short orange handle was added to the list of items in my growing arsenal of tools – many of which, as Bob incessantly pointed out during the disassembly process, are his. By pulling the pin from the end of the jack arm we had a perfect, or so we thought, surrogate cluster gear shaft. It slid right into place. Out came the primary gear cluster, and with it a second gear that had taken some abuse in its lifetime. You could see the pits and chips where the gear mated with the synchro, though there were no metal particles in the oil I had drained.
Gear and synchronizer
It was a perfect stopping point, and gave me a chance to contact some classic Lotus parts places to see if they had the proper synchro set in stock and a replacement second gear. (As a 1969 model, my year Elan saw a switch from a gearset held in place by a draw nut to one held by snap rings. The change brought with it a change in synchronizer design. It also means that some Elan gearboxes have a 37-mm inner diameter second gear and others a 35-mm ID.) This meant that the next day – July 2, also marked on the calendar – would bring the disassembly of the main gearset.
Two days in a row working with Bob on the Lotus! I can’t recall the last time that happened. (I’ve thrown out my old calendars.) But there he was in the garage, reading through the shop manual to see how to remove the gears from the mainshaft. That was when he realized that he had taken his digital measuring calipers home the previous day. I was sorely tempted to mention how, if he had left the thing at my house with the rest of his tools, there’d be no reason to go home and get it, but I resisted. “That’s why I want a shop of my own, so I can have all of the tools in one place,” he said as he headed out to his car. “Why,” I replied, “do I get the feeling I’d never know where this shop is located?” All he did was smile. Hmmm.
As it turns out, the second gear had 28 teeth and a 37-mm ID, just as Jay at JAE thought it would. But the dummy shaft turned out to be just ever so slightly too long. That meant we couldn’t drop the cluster gearset intact into the bottom of the case in order to pull the main gear out. And that meant the needle bearings we tried so hard to keep in place had to be drawn out with a magnet and counted. With everything bagged and tagged, we could go no further. Well, that’s not entirely true. I now have the job of cleaning up all of the rotating parts, cases (inside and out) and miscellaneous parts prior to reassembly after the new synchros and second gear get here next week. With luck, I won’t have to go too far ahead in my calendar to mark that date – or bake a cake while I’m waiting.
You must log in to post a comment.