This weekend I finished rebuilding the reduction boxes. Luckily I was able to do this with engine/transmission still installed. It’s a relatively simple process overall, but because most of the parts involved are press fit I had to get creative and make/modify various pulling/holding tools. The old bearings didn’t have any signs of complete failure (yet) but most did have rust pitting and a few had a fair amount of excess play. Driving the bus after the swap is a night/day difference in noise. Its still loud, but now that a major noise source has been eliminated it’s just a matter of tracking down all the miscellaneous body air leaks and other minor noise sources.

Also, I finally found a passenger front lower seat section – these are hard to find since they’re specific to the ‘walk-through’ option, especially since I already had the top part and didn’t want to buy the whole thing. The one I found only included the springs without the seat frame itself, but the frame seems easy enough to fabricate and I’ve started on this using scrap metal from the incorrect (vanagon?) seats that came with the bus when I got it.

This weekend I finally pulled the engine and transmission from the bus – each time I’ve done this I’m amazed at how few connections there are and how relatively quickly it goes. The goals for this effort are to figure out what happened that caused the breakdown last year as well as fix the problems that had been occurring since the original ‘rebuild’ (more of a clean and reseal). These problems included:

• Immediate pop out of 1st gear and inability to hold in gear. This effectively meant no 1st gear, requiring always starting in 2nd gear.
• 4th gear popped out under load, but could be held in place by a bungee cord. This worked, but is a really inconvenient way to drive and would eventually cause excess wear on the shift forks and slide gears.
• Gear oil leaking from center. This should be an easy fix, I didn’t originally realize the paper gaskets used for  the reseal were not treated; using gasket sealer this time should solve this problem.
• Too slow. Currently the bus red-lines in 4th gear somewhere in the low-to-mid 60MPH range, which mostly rules out interstate travel. More flexibility to do longer trips and even to more easily run errands locally would be nice to have. The engine is a little bigger than stock and should be able to handle the higher load, but gearing changes will be needed to get the RPM’s down.

I started disassembly and found that the internals seem to be in incredibly good shape, the teeth show little or no wear even looking under a microscope. All the gear ratios match what would be expected for a ’67 bus except 4th – for some reason it has a 0.88 ratio rather than the 0.82 ratio that would be expected. The 0.88 4th gear would be consistent with a beetle transmission, so I think this information combined with the amazing internal condition tells me that the transmission was replaced with a new or re-manufactured beetle transmission (while keeping the bus axles and reduction boxes) at some point very late in the bus’s history. The top speed would have dropped dramatically after this change and perhaps this contributed to it being parked semi-permanently in the early 80’s.