Hmmm? Isn't it? Banana?

Breaking stuff

Friday was a night of much amusement, dust, and gearbox oil. If you are easily bored by anything involving technical detail, you may want to move along. This won't appeal to all of you!

My mate had a small, erm, 'incident' in his car involving the front wheels locking solid at 40mph as he approached a roundabout. The gearbox had seized solid, after we had been telling him that the whine he had been hearing for the last 2 months was "nothing to worry about" and that he should "ignore it and keep driving the car". We were considering that the car was only worth £750 or so, and so the cost of a new/scrap/exchange gearbox was not worth the expense and the hassle till it was properly broken.

We decided that the point when it seized solid with a bang and a cloud of smoke and deposited him on a grass verge in the middle of a major road junction may actually tick that box...

So, by way of comaraderie (or guilt - you choose) we all descended on where the car was being stored since the drama (at a farm, as it happens) to see what could be done about fixing it. Just swapping it for another scrap 'box was written off as not worth it (upward of £200 for one) so we decided to take it off the car, strip it down and see if we could just replace a few bits and get it running again.

As I arrived (half 6 in the evening straight from work) 2 of the boys had already got the box out of the car, and after a brief pause for coffee, tea and playing with a new digi camera, we set to it. It all started off in a rather civilized fashion; one taking pictures of the box as we took it apart, one marking up bags for the various bolts and spacers and such, the others taking things off. All very good stuff.

"Now, before we take too much apart, we need to make sure that we don't lose any bits".

As this nugget of (perfectly sound) wisdom was being imparted, cue yours truly pulling a little too hard on one of the selector rings and firing 3 tiny sets of spring, detente ball and pilot guide across the workshop floor.

"Ah. We said we weren't going to do that, didn't we?" I mused. As they all laughed/scrabbled on the floor for the errant bits/glowered at me/took the piss respectively, we carried on. Not the last time that little scenario was played out, either. I didn't do the second one, though. I had learned my lesson. And there were more bits in that one. It took 2 of them to put it back together...

It subsequently transpired that first gear's bearing had welded itself to the main shaft (effectively going into 1st gear without the aid of the gearstick) at exactly the same moment as 3rd gear was selected on the approach to the roundabout. Gearboxes have a rather strong aversion to being in two gears at once. It upsets them and makes them unhappy. This particular one decided to show it's displeasure by stripping half the teeth off of 3rd gear, jamming the resulting bits of teeth into the main shaft bearings and exploding it. Consequently, the gearbox is, and this is the technical term, buggered. This is the conclusion that we arrived at with our 3 Mechanical (Vehicle) Engineering degrees and one Enviromental Science degree (the owner of the car).

It was so buggered, that we had to use 4 crowbars, 4 blokes, a blowtorch and a bloody great hammer to actually get it apart so that we could see the final damage quota. We even broke the gearbox casing itself trying to get the gear off the shaft. Here was the end result, and here is one of the reasons that it all got messy...

Unbelievable. It's amazing what mechanical devices can do when things go wrong. Such forces involved. Anyway, it was beyond repair. It most definately was by the time we finished with it, too. We had never held out much hope for it though, I have to confess. It was the car equivalent of that bloke on Star Trek in the red jumper that used to go down to the planet with the away parties. You know, the one played by an actor that you'd never seen before. He had 'dead' written all over him before he'd even stopped being wobbly from the transport.

RIP Saab gearbox. Ho hum. We'll have to see what can be found for our erstwhile companion by way of transport. He'd probably better not get any advice from us about the soundness of any potentials, though. We may have blighted our copy book with the last one!

posted by Brock @ Sunday, October 10, 2004