Right, so at this stage I had the car with its back end up on ramps, the engine sat back in the bay and the old gearbox shoved under the car out of the weather. I also had the ropey sounding LT77 to deal with. The next logical step would have been to get the LT77 on the bench and strip it to see what had gone wrong. Only problem with that was that I didnt actually have a bench. I have made do with just an old workmate up until now, and that needed to change:
So i bought some wood:
And made a bench:
This necessitated me having a huge sort out and tidy up of the whole garage, it had become a huge mess when i did the chassis swap on the Defender last year, but eventually i got it in there (i realise it looks like i haven't tidied anything!):
So then i got down to what I wanted to do, and starting getting the box apart. On getting to fifth gear everything looked good:
But splitting the main case soon showed what had gone wrong, the reverse gear was totally destroyed. The layshaft had suffered some damage, but looked like it should be ok.
Ouch!:
Yikes...
Layshaft:
The oil pump housing was heavily scored although the pump gear didnt look too bad!
Whilst cleaning the pump oil way a lot of swarf came out, including this large chunk:
I went onto Rimmers to order a new reverse idler, and thought i'd check layshaft prices whilst I was there - they were listed at over £800!
Plan B was to check the LR catalogue of parts to see if anything would match the tooth counts on the SD1 part, but nothing quite did so that put an end to that. I even stripped a spare Defender LT77 to see for myself - but no dice.
I decided to therefore carry on with the layshaft I had, but to strip everything down and clean out all the swarf and renew all the bearings. This was a shame as it looks like it had been rebuilt not long before this happened, all the bearings seemed good, and the gearbox number is not a standard one - the boss where the number is stamped has been faced off and restamped with a random number.
Nice new gear arrived, love an original BL box!
I'll show the stripdown of the box in my next post - it takes forever to dig the photos out off my network storage, there's a lot on there!