Gearbox disaster

My gearbox failed with a bang on on the King of Mantorp TA-event. Totally unexpected on the day's last cooldown lap. Looking at the log file I didn't even have 50% throttle when it happened.

The good news was it was easy to see where the problem was. The bad news was I it looked rather serious. When opening the top lid everything looked normal which at least gave me some hope.

We don't have a company named Road'n'Race Transmissions here, so it took some effort to find somebody that was even interested to look at the gearbox. As it turned out, the man I eventually found knew a lot about type-9 gearboxes and I must say gave me very good confidence it could be fixed, and with an helpful attitude.

Bertil Carlsson in Vejbystrand, described what have happened as a locking nut had shaken loose, causing the big end nut unscrew itself through the casing. Something that he'd never seen before.

The case was welded, the nut was replaced, and while he was at it he replaced the sync-ring between gear 5 and 6 which was very worn. Everything prompt and for a very reasonable price. (I'm not sure what could have caused the worn sync-ring. The only thing I can think of is that I had a cracked clutch plate a long time ago that made gear changes difficult at high rpm.)

That said - someone (not me and not Bertil) did really mess up the order of the bolt from Caterham, and therefore this little disaster took a big part of the summer. I'm a bit disappointed about this but I guess I should be happy it turned out as good as it did, and that I didn't have to buy a brand new Sadev sequential gearbox with paddles.... ...because I couldn't afford it.

All right - time to put the engine back in and see what's left of the summer!