Fanofthevan - Steve Rooker´s 1955 samba

This year the bus started out just waiting as the gearbox wasn't ready for to be collected until April,

Hans called me and said there was nothing wrong with the gearbox and that It was most probably the flanges and that he thought they were really tight and that this was the cause for a noisy 4th gear

well i was a bit confued a that but what else could i do, so I went to his workshop and collected my gearbox and all the other parts that he had dismantled

Soon after I did changed the flanges as instructed by Hans and was ready to put things back together.

May was a busy month with Travis taking Studenten but in June I had things back together and was itching to take it for a test drive, where I was hoping that the noise in 4th was gone

I pressed the bearing housing off, swapped flanges, pressed the bearing housing back on to the axle tubes, then attached those back on the gearbox and shimmed, repeatedly until the desired feeling was found. Then I touched up the paint on the axle tubes and re installed the gearbox in the bus, torqued up everything, had to get a new gasket and a rubber o ring for the rear hubs, but once they had arrived I cracked on and soon I was filling it with fresh gear box oil until it ran out of the fill plug hole.

Next the engine was fitted, wired up, plumbed in the oil hoses and changed the oil filter, filled with fresh oil and started up. All good so far.

Below video is when I am carefully driving out to test 4th - unfortunately the noise was still exactly the same in 4th !

The flanges did nothing - as I and many others had suspected.

I sent a message to Hans in August once I had been to the "Besiktning" mot and given it a good drive. As of yet no reply. I think the 4th gears are either pitted and it was a miss matched set of gears that had not worn together, or it is not quite shimmed correctly - I don't think it is a bearing as the noise is more gear lash sound but we will find out later - maybe in the winter when I remove the gearbox and get it checked over by some one else.

I parked the problem with 4th gear and instead focused on getting things good so that I could take the bus to the registration test"besiktning" .