Hi all,
Another rare find" New genuine Fiat Coupe plastic gear change bottom bracket for £14.99
Ebay number 271203076507

I occasionally have problems selecting 3rd and 4th and therefore this gear bracket maybe the cure. Don't hang around as you wont be able to get new ones again l'm sure!!

This is for the later 5 speed box Oct-1997 onwards

i got problems downshifting to 4th, 3th and 2e gear when the engine is cold, will this change anything or is my gearbox just shot to hell?

Hi VDVT
The plastic gear change bottom bracket if faulty or damaged can cause problems when downshifting gears and although I cant promise that this will solve your problem, a guy I met a week ago also mentioned he had to change his gear change bottom bracket a couple of years ago and this solved the problem" yeap a simple plastic bracket!! I very much doubt your gearbox is shot and this may well cure the problem" let me know mate.

I have problems downshifting like you and without mentioning a certain expert member on here who mends and services my car he has also mentioned this bracket as a possible problem causing my gear problems.

I have heard that this is fairly easy job to replace so for the sake of £14.99 maybe the cheapest repair problem you fix on your coupe. Your gear lever stick connects to this bracket and plastic easily breaks!!

Has anyone else fitted one of these and was it hard. Although I will be getting Poweritalia to do mine anyway.

By the way people this bracket is for the later 5 speed gearbox 1997 onwwards and as DAVEG has rightly pointed out. I have a 20v turbo coupe and this bracket fits mine.

mine is from 98 so it shouldn't be that much of a problem. ill order one and have a look, like you said Dale, it might very well turn out to be the cheapest repair ever :-)

I'll have to ask Rog if this might help my gear change too as I missed third the other day while driving along next to a brand new M3...

It might be a cheap fix for the part, but its a ball-ache to change.
Underside tunnel floor plate has to come off.... after you've moved the exhaust away..
A good few £££'s in labour if you farm the job out to a garage, and a few hours of your day if you do it yourself !

This plastic housing is a fairly common part across the ranges... fiats Marea/Bravo/Brava for instance.


This old post might prepare you !

yep, thought this wouldn't be possible from inside the car.
Doesn't look like ( i just jinxed it didn't i ? ) its a 'big' job. time consuming perhaps yes. JonH you mention in that old post to free up the linkage levers/shaft on top of the gearbox... you just cleaned them and greased them back or did you take it appart? maybe a pic if you have one laying around. First time i am going to remove the undertunnel from a car and definitely first time i even look at the linkage levers/shafts of the gearbox so if you have some more intel on this it would be realy appreciated.
Ordered my part from EB, waiting for it to arrive. hope it helps a bit with the gears. wait and see.

regards

You are mightily in luck as I have just ripped my linkage apart on top of the gearbox about an hour ago(again - the cleanup and greasing was a short term fix by the looks of things).

I'll be back onto it on tuesday, I think, and will take a set of pics then.
The gate selector shaft is most definately mega stiff in the top bushings and it is this strain that kills the tunnel selector plastic housing.

On top of the gearbox......
Currently Ive got the top shaft out of the housing (tapping it out with a 'bit' of force) and what I need to do now is ream the two bushes that the shaft rests upon, within the housing.
These bushes look like they are Nylatron or Nylon66(graphite impregnated) and I'm pretty confident that they 'swell' ever so slightly over time. And I dont think greasing them helped to be honest (it may even have added to the swelling). The Nylatron should have been self lubricating.


Ive been measuring

Shaft diameter is 14.645mm. You may be puzzled as to this size but believe it or not old measurement standards die hard and its all to do with imperial fractions.

37/64" is a standard imperial size which equates to 14.684375mm and this, I suggest, should be the bored diameter of the bushes!.
And if you take the differance between the bore hole size and the shaft diameter size you get 0.039375mm.......... which equates to '1 thou' clearance between the two.

With the bushes swelled up that clearance decreases to the point that its an interference/friction fit....... which kills the plastic housing as it cant take that amount of strain acting against it.

So the answer is to ream the two bushes back to a sliding fit on the shaft. The tolerances have to be quite precise as any excess slack will be as bad as too tight - you wont get accurate gear selection with a sloppy shaft (any slight excess clearance which you create 7.3+mm from the centreline of the shaft will be magnified many times by the time the excess movement acts at the extremity of the lever arms).


Unfortunately I havent got a 37/64" reamer or an expanding one to fit so I've had to order one today so that I can reassemble everything.
Its going to be tight getting the reamer in on a straight plane to enlarge the bushes insitu but its do-able (just). If I cant get the reamer in then the selector block will have to come off the gearbox in order to do the necessary work.


Until episode 2 next week !................

Your posts are making for an interesting read. There is a problem with mine also, bought the part ages ago.

Brass bush needed ideally?

I have considered doing this on the lathe, or maybe phosphour bronze, but then you will be definately needing grease as well and maybe regular-ish cleaning out unless you fit grease nipples.

I presumed Fiat engineered out the greasing requirement by going to Nylatron, which would more than likely have been fine for the 'standard' lifespan of a car (~7 years?), but we are experiencing the problems now because of it.

I think the problem with this bush is not time itself, but time spent in oily surroundings.

I was having gear selection difficulties, traced the problem to this area - I originally thought it was the collapsed o/s engine mount and then thought it was the plastic bracket at gearstick.

When I realized where the problem lay I applied lubricant, quite incorrectly as it turned out as the problem became extreme within a few hours.

Right.

All done.
What a transformation
If before it was like a bar of cheap bitter chocolate, all chunky and notchy, its now a family sized bar of Galaxy chocolate (Silky smooth and you want more and more !).

Ive done a little 'how to' guide as a pdf if anyone fancies a peek............ but whats the best way to make it available for all to see if they want ???. (I've got no excess website space available to host). 1.26Mb file size.


Jon

Easiest way to get free hosting is to convert pdf to video with Acrobat or the like and put on YouTube.

Couldn`t a pdf be uploaded here though?

I thought I could , but I cant find out how !!!

Jon, PM Kelv27, he usually deals with the how-to's.

Good one btw

I've uploaded the file to my webspace, here .

Thanks for doing this Graham, much appreciated.

Good work, a nice little guide.
Fairly easy job to do too - especially if your car is stripped already.
Now to buy a reamer.
Many thanks for your efforts.

nice guide, sadly i don't understand shit haha. englisch translation and lack of mechanical skill i gues

I`ll try to do a video guide when I do mine at the weekend.

I got a reamer for £11.20.
I prefer a lubricated aperture, fortunately I have some PTFE spray.

No need for reamer, just take out the bushes, have a clean of the hole with some sandpaper and get a new set of bushers from Fiat.

Could you not use a small flex hone brush to sort them? I used sandpaper and some WD40 when I did mine - took ages though.

Without doubt this too is an answer to the issue... its more or less what I did the first time round (wet&dry paper) but it really is hit and miss this way and you can end up rubbing the bore out to a diameter larger than is necessary, or indeed creating a non circular hole.
Also, when I reamed the bushes out last week it seemed that one of the bushes didnt need as much taken off as the other one which points perhaps to one not being as contaminated as the other with oils - and if you are doing the wet & dry method you could theoretically be making an 'ok' bush larger than it needs to end up purely by running the abrasive through both to get the smaller bush back to its correct diameter.

And the wet and dry takes a little bit of time, stooped over in the engine bay, for what is in reality a hit and miss fix (been there, done it).

Ignoring the ancillary equipment removal times - the reamer was in, bushes reamed, and out again in less than 2 minutes producing an engineered fix. Plus, if the bushes continue to swell over the next few years they can be quickly reamed through again essy peasy.

Footnote after reaming :-
The car now, having driven it for the week, really has tranformed.
Gearchanging is very quick and effortlessly smooth across the gates.
And there has not been even the slightest hint of 2nd guessing if the gear that I choose to select next will actually be the gear that the car decides to select !.