The gear change that wouldn't

Although the Herald can suffer from significant wear in the gear change linkage, I've never experienced a gear change as awful as that on this car. There appeared to be two reasons for this. Firstly, the gear linkage bushes were shot, but also, due to the design of the car, the seats were further back than in the Herald. This meant that the standard gear lever is too far forward to reach easily (like the handbrake) and so a modified gear lever had been made. This was in a very flat "s" shape and I found it difficult to get from third to second in particular. You can just see the gear lever to the left of the picture below.

Ideally I wanted the gear lever to be much nearer as I hated the one I had. I thought about making a custom remote gear change and drafted out plans for such a thing. However, a chance discussion with a friend resulted in a suggestion which I followed through - thanks Steve. He suggested I get another remote extension and weld the two together. What a clever fellow. Once again, Ebay to the rescue. I managed to get two remote castings and internals for less than the price of just one other that was being advertised. I bought two because I reckoned that if the project failed I still wanted one working remote!

What I hadn't realised was that the remote castings were not parallel but had a slight taper so choosing a place to cut them wasn't as easy as I had imagined. After a bit of jiggling and measuring I choose the best point on each and cut the front off one and the back off the other. A local firm welded the aluminium castings together and I then had to work out the length of the internal actuating rod I need to fabricate to ensure I could select all gears. I cut the two rods and found a suitable piece of tubing to use as a sleeve and had one end welded. I then estimated the length and used a self-tapper to locate the other end. My friendly welder attached the other end. I used the new bushes I had bought, and in theory, all was done, so I removed the old gear change and fitted the new. Marvellous - the gear lever was to hand and each gear could be easily selected.

The new extended remote gear change

 

I then inspected the old remote I had removed and found that the gate that stops reverse being selected without downward pressure on the gear lever had almost disappeared and that when changing down from third to second it was virtually certain that the reverse gear position would be selected.