Iain's 20XE Trackday Nova

[Iain]

PART 3/3

Something I've had a for a while and just got round to fitting, I wanted some window nets so I can crack my windows open on trackdays. The proper way to fit these is round the cage, but my massive seats don't allow that, so I've welded some bracketry to the top of the door frame:








This allows a top rail to be clipped in:





Window net with top and bottom rail:





It was slightly too tall to fit on the door so I hired a Hayley to stitch the bottom hoops to reduce the total height (on pic above):





Rivnuts on bottom of door frame:





Window net in place:





Drivers side done too:








Nice big red button visible on passenger side for quick removal:





All done:

[BRoadGhost]

Erm I might need to double check this on my images (not on right computer atm) but those shaft ends look to come to too sharp a point; this would explain your play woes.

[Iain]

There's still a tiny bit of movement on the splines on the new shafts, however I tried an OE CV on an OE Vauxhall shaft and they had a similar amount of movement. Hoping the hardening on these stops them wearing down and becoming extremely sloppy like the last ones.

[bazzap8389]

Hopefully the shafts do the job and don't snap/wear. Broadghost, the ones I made are an exact (within .001") of a set of equal length shafts I had.

[Benn]

Shafts are shiney, i approve. Like the window nets too.

[Iain]

Some niggly jobs sorted now, I can finally use the car.

Unfortunately didn't make it to Billing as diagnosed a fairly bad gearbox fault, so cracked on with fixing it.

Whilst the box is off, I ran the engine up on 1 mount and 2 axle stands:



Oil leaks, sponsored by Imperial Leather Talcum powder clearly showed the problem leak, the end cap! You can see it on the right join here:



So sump, pickup, gasket etc off, then end cap off and resealed properly with RTV:



Now onto the good stuff, the gearbox. It had been having really bad feedback through the selector turret and up the stick for a while, and something was amiss. I ran it up on axle stands without the selector turret on and noticed a hell of a lot of movement through the output shaft, so unfortunately it had to be stripped.

So box off:



End cap and fifth coming off:



Cluster out:



Cluster stripped, which involved removing all the selector arms, circlips, etc, got a pile of bits at this point



The culprit, the large circlip holding the output shaft into the end plate wasn't actually seated at all, so it was just bouncing between the end casing and the gears and the other shaft gears, eek. The circlip is damaged as is the needle bearing spacer pictured here. The spacer was actually fitted the wrong way round which meant the circlip would never seat properly...



Luckily I have a spare cluster (well, 2), so I've used the end casing, circlip, spacer and needle bearing from the spare cluster, and re-used both shafts and casing from the current box. Bit sparse on pictures, but it's all built up again all clean:



Refitted an there's a tiny bit of movement but very happy with it now. No more leak from the gearbox end, so one happy Iain.

Thanks to Stuart for the explanation for stripping the box and Harvey for lending a hand with the sump sealing.

[House]

Top work old chum!!

[Harvey]

It was very satisfying hitting your shaft very hard.

Just glad the box is sorted, strange it never did it when I had it fitted but I do drive like Miss Daisy. I'll get my engine drip sorted one day.

[House]

It's not a real Vauxhall if it doesn't drip oil Harvey!!!

[Iain]

I've only fixed all the bloody leaks took it out for a few hours last night and the garage floor is bone dry today!