Replacing worn shift rod bushing??

I know on Bugs, that you have to remove these 2 panels in order to slide out the shift rod... I replaced one in high school on a buddy's VW Bug.. Can somebody correct me if I am wrong here...

Disconnect shift coupler-from transmission
Take Shifter out of floor.

Now, my question is how difficult is it to slide that shaft out the front with a CMC car? Thanks guys. Hoping this is my rattle/sloppy shifter...

without unbolting the body (and tilting the front up) - it's impossible to pull the shift rod out without drilling an access hole.

VW's had two inspection holes (that didnt sound good did it?)

When you've loosened the tapered screw to the point where the tip has disappeared inside the nylon bushing on the side opposite of the head, whichever side that is in your car, feel for the snugness of the bushing. If it's loose, get a new one to install as you put these parts back together. Cheap insurance.

Remove the screw the rest of the way.

When you take the shifter rod out, it'll be by inching it forward along the inside of the tunnel from above, with a good pair of needle-nosed pliers. I don't have to worry about how I remove mine anymore, since my car is significantly different, but what I had to do before I hacked it up was pretty simple.

Use a long bootlace to catch the end of the shifter rod. Feed the laminated end of the lace through the hole in the end of the shifter rod. You'll be using that line later, to keep the end of the rod parallel to the top of the tunnel, and it will ensure you can pull it back into its correct functional position when you've replaced the bushing. A shoelace will be too short.

Feed the string through the end of the shifter rod, and tie it off to itself.

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After the rod is completely free of the flange, you'll be able to remove the old bushing. If you were a VeeDub mechanic being paid by the job, you could bill yourself four hours, 'cuz you're halfway there.

There should be a bootlace trailing out the back end of the tunnel. Tie him off to something handy, like a box-wrench that's too big to fit through the access hole.

Don't pull that bushing out of the shifter-hole just yet. Feel it with your fingers for a groove and a wire, just so you remember the orientation you found it in. The blunt end should be on your side of the flange, then the groove and wire, then the flange and finally the tapered end should protrude toward the rear of the car.

Remove and inspect the old bushing, and inspect also the wire clip that encircles it. The wire clip is critical, and may not have come with your new part. Set it on your ragged-out-shirt/parts drop, just in case.

Chances are, the top and bottom of the bushing are thinned out, and that would explain a lot of sloppy shifting. The new bushing, nylon, most likely, will be the same thickness throughout and will have a defined lip and trough where the circlip wire needs to go when it's installed.

Identify a place on your floorboard to put your Dixie cup containing that dollop of grease. Take whatever precautions you need to for the carpet, and maybe get some fresh gloves.

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Holesaw.

angela

Keith, what'cha gotta look for is that inspection hole. In a Speedster, it'll be under the back seat. Remove the seat, and look for the panel held in with rivets. Drill the rivets.

What you should see down there is the shift coupler, best accessed from above. If you have to do this from under the car, you'll need four wrists and a couple mirrors.

The bit about uncoupling the rod from the connection back there sounds easy, but there are a couple things to concern yourself with first. I use a safety net. Get six or eight of your strongest magnets off of your beer fridge, and put a tee-shirt into the hole under the coupler like a basketball net; let it hang down so you have plenty of room to work in, and then magnetically attach it to the tunnel out of the way of your hands and wrenches, like down beside the frame horns or something.

Invariably, if you don't do that, the screw that passes horizontally through the coupler will fall into the abyss. It will land next to an acorn. There's always an acorn.

So, you're on it so far. Step one -- get'cha some rubber exam gloves and remove the shifter. The ball sits in a cup that should be filled with grease. As you lift the ball out of the cup, peel back one of your gloves over the end of the shifter, to contain the lever's greasy end, the spring and the plate. Keep that contained so you don't risk your carpet. Put it and the bolts aside, on an old tee-shirt you've designated as the landing zone for parts. You being mechanically inclined and all, I assume you have a system, right? :)

Anyway, loosen the coupler after your safety net is in place. There may or may not be a safety wire through the tapered screw with the square head. Mental note; if there isn't a safety wire, remember to make one on re-installation. Bread ties are too short, so you'll need some safety wire.

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Go back up to the hole in the tunnel where you started your surgery. Get out your best good roll of blue painter's tape, and start covering as much of the carpet as you care to around the surgical site. It's equivalent to shaving your patient; if you don't know the person ... But hey, this is YOUR car we're takling about here.

Right. After you've covered the tunnel to about six inches around the shifter socket, put a glove back on and feel around inside the back (rear) of the hole in the tunnel. You'll already plainly see the shifter cup, but if you feel around with your fingers at the top of the tunnel, you'll feel the metal flange (sticking straight down) which contains the bushing. The bushing is probably pretty easily removed with a little convincing and some pliers, but you don't need to do that. Resist the urge.

Back up a minute. If you smoke, have one. Your hands are about to get tired, and you have to get a couple things together. You'll want those needle-nosed pliers, a coat hanger, a small-headed set of channel-locks which will fit through the shifter hole and still capture the shifter rod (a one-and-a-half-inch jaw will probably be the biggest ones you'd want to use) and a little Dixie cup of grease.

Bend the coat-hanger into a three-inch-deep "U" which will fit into the hole, then bend the rest of the wire like saddlebags over the tunnel. It's another safety net, this time to prevent the shifter rod from going where gravity wants it to when you have it out of the flange. The string and the coat hanger should ensure that you don't wind up waking the neighbors with your screams about "Why did I buy this CAR?!"

After you have the hanger in place and out of the way of your hands and tools, place the needle-noses around the rod between the cup and the flange. Inching the rod toward the front of the car a little at a time, you'll eventually make enough headway to grab the rod with the channel-locks. If you don't have luck with the channel-locks, the needle-noses WILL get you there. Continue to pull gently until you pull the entire rod through the flange.

I use the back of the shifter's hole as a lever to push against, using a similar motion as if I were shifting to second gear. Loosen, re-apply, shift (and so on).

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Angela's cheese has slipped off her cracker. ;-)
While drilling a hole in your tunnel might -- maybe -- be the easier route to go, it also puts a nice hole in your carpet in a CMC. I'm assuming your carpet is glued in, and you'd be replacing the whole thing to fix a little bushing.
And she has a Spyder, anyway. They look good with holes drilled in them.

Where was I?

Now, in your hole there, you're looking at the rearward end of the shifter rod, your string and your coat hanger. The string is going through the center of the old bushing and your circlip. Go ahead and remove them from the hole if you haven't already, and place the replacement parts back on the string. That little operation is made so much easier by the presence of the string that I'm surprised it's not in Muir's book.

Lube that little nylon guy up but good with grease, and push it through the hole. press-pinch the wire circlip so it's big enough to go around the shifter rod, but don't fit it onto the bushing just yet. Start walking the rod backward now, with a two-count movement. Grease the rod a little, then inch it into the hole. You know, just like ... well, replacing a shifter bushing. After you're sure it's in there, through the flange and protruding through it far enough that you can slip the wire clip back around the nylon bushing, do so. then continue to lube and slide, lube and slide, lube and slide.

You may be retirement age by the time you're finished if you do the whole thing manually. If you prefer, you could go to that box-wrench with the bootlace on it and begin gently pulling to the rearward.

When the rod comes into view back there, reassemble the whole shooting match the opposite of the way you took it apart. Remember that safety wire, and, if you needed it, that new coupler bushing.

After all that, the only advice you may need is how to fine-tune the shift pattern before you bolt down your cover plate on reassembly. That part's easy-peasy, and I'm sure you know what you're doing from there. If it feels wrong, it's wrong.

Eyeball your current shifter position in neutral, and make sure you know what reverse feels like. Each CMC shifter rod assembly is slightly different; my neutral is slightly to the rear of vertical, with the knob inclined about two inches to the rear being normal. Take a digital picture of yours for reference before you get started, just to ballpark where to start your adjustments when you get to that point.

Easy as pie.

Cory, I can honestly say that if I ever have to attempt what you just described I will probably just do what the guys on Top Gear (England) do and drop a piano on the car.

Angela's cheese has slipped off her cracker. ;-) BWAAHAHAHAHA !

Yes !... you can pull the shift rod out the front of a speedster, I do it all the time, but if just changing the nylon bushing you can work it forward and out of the old bushing with long needle nose pliers down into the shifter hole. If removing the rod from the tunnel, when it hits against the bottom of the fiberglass battery box apply a little grease and force it down and pull it out, tap it back into the inspection cover hole with a rubber mallet. ~Alan

If you take my front bumper off you will see a hole with a plug in it.. I also put a hole and flat plate cover in the trunk floor so a shift tube can be reinstalled ..

If by some chance I didn.t like the fully automatic.. I wanted to be able to convert it back easyer ..

It wouldn't be to hard to make the body mods for that now.. I got the body plug from Steele Rubber Products I made the plate cover from 16 guage steel and used the vw steering box cover plate ( the one with the hump on it) as a pattern .. then your car would be like a factory fix proceedure.. Except for removing the bumper.. the same..

It pays to plan this stuff..

Any good air-cooled guys near Nashville that want to make a few hundred bucks?? Holy cow!! I want to thank you for taking the time to explain that... Sounds like a weekend fix for a $3 part.

Alan, it is just changing the nylon bushing... How far fw of the shifter hole is this bushing..

That's the thing, Keith. All that HAS to be done to get the new bushings IN. the worn-out old one is shot and probably worn in half, but the new one has got to be installed by passing the rod out through the guide hole.

That hole is hanging from the top of the tunnel, and it's less than an inch back from where the rear bolt holding that diamond-shaped shifter cover plate is.

What Alan has described involves removing an access plate in the front of the beam, which I have never found to be necessary. If you look under your car at the center of the tubes your trailing arms come out of, you'll see a five-or-so-inch access plate which, when removed, allows you to see all the way down the tunnel from front to back. In a Bug, that's where the shifter rod would come through for this operation -- but your rod is probably 12-14 inches shorter than stock, and doesn't have to come out there. I have never taken mine that far forward.

It can all be done from inside the car, but you have to be patient. VW mechanics used to bill that as an eight-hour repair. It takes me four on a good day. It probably takes Alan about two, but he's done it a number of times.

Give it a try. Worst-case scenario, you still have to take it to a guy. It isn't difficult, but it is tedious.

When I get home, I'll dig into it".... This is the most lame thing ever by VW... The rest of the car is genius...

Can I see this nylon bushing through the shifter hole after I take out the shifter? It'd be nice to inspect this thing... Perhaps it's not my rattle....

It'll only rattle if the bushing's shot entirely.

If you're able to get your hands on one of those little mirrors dentists use, you'll be able to see it, but otherwise it's going to be something you have to feel for.

It has a lip on the front that probably won't have any obvious deformities. Generally, the symptoms you'll notice most is that you'll grind your gears as you shift through second and third.

Instead of being able to throw the shifter directly into the next gear, you'll instead get an approximate throw. It'll be kind of sloppy, and you'll have to adjust the way YOU shift to the car's new behavior. That bushing's only job is to smooth that out.

Whenever that happens, you'll absolutely know it's time. If you decide to tackle this yourself, give me a call when you're getting started.

I ground 2nd on my downshifts a couple of times. I have a lot of manual trans driving experience.... And it kind of points to the feel of "didn't engage the synchro all the way" type grind. The 2-3 grinds I got, would not go into gear. It wasn't the infamous reverse! We all know that one.... Yikes. The shifter just feels too sloppy. I know brand new everything, it's still not like a top loaded trans, but I can get this better. I do have a mirror tool, thanks. If this isn't my rattle, it's got to be the clutch cable tube..

And cheese off my cracker? Are you kidding? Not only has the cheese slipped off I don't know where the cracker went...

angela

Angela, are you limp'n ? ...it's under your shoe :~)

You guys are making me hungry, all this cracker and cheese talk...

If your clutch cable tube is lose I have drilled 2 1/4 inch holes in the tunnel above and below it and fished a peace of mechanics wire around in the botom and back out the top hole and tie it off to snug up the tube..

Its a cheap patch that works well.. Just don't go oveboard twisting the wire and kink the tube..

Mechanic wire can also could hold your shift tube up as a hanger while your sliding it foward to clear the bushing hole..

I've done that too..

I do agree thou.. Someone shoud make a 2 peace snap together bushing to make this a quick repair . Vw sure didn't offer one

Can you not see the clutch tube from under the car? I'd rather tack weld it if I can...

Tube is inside the tunnel, once located drill next to the tube being careful not to drill into it then, lightly tack weld it securely in place.... A 20 minute fix. ~Alan

I assume I can feel this tube once the shifter is out?

Shifters have a a ball on it, that rests into a cup in the shift rod, the nylon bushing is about 1.5 from the rear portion on the shifter hole. Easy to remove and I don't use the metal retaining ring, just pop the new bushing into the hanger (hope you have long fingers).
The reason that I do remove the rod is I grind a slight taper on the end of the rod so that with a bit of applied grease it slips right through the nylon bushing you already set into the tunnel mounted bushing hanger ~Alan

You grind a taper on the coupler side?? Confused..

Yes, I grind a taper about 1/4" long on the coupler side of the shift rod so that it is easier to pass through the nylon bushing. The OD diameter of the rod and the ID of the bushing make it difficult if not nearly impossible w/o the taper and grease ...

Vince.. will surely chime here ~

Thanks Alan...

Alan should also have warned you carfully check your mig settings if you do it that way.

I have burned throu the tube when doing, what he is suggesting.


But if your good? Go for it!!

I'll just TIG it if it's broken... I'll know next week. I know I won't burn through it if I TIG it... Thanks though!

You know what you could do...

If it is broken, why don't you make one that unbolts? An L-shaped bracket with captive nuts, drop two bolts through the top of the transmission tunnel to hold it secure.

Then you can unbolt it from the top, and either just slide the whole rod a few inches back to the access hole and replace a bushing, or wiggle it off the linkage with the front of the linkage still secure.

A little fabrication now, a lifetime of easy servicing.

angela

So funny, I had a stash of acorns shells in my frame horns. Thank goodness for the 27mm engine mount bolts!

To mig a clutch tube to the tunnel, I favor the thicker tunnel wall, no burn through.