Hi Mark,

My experience is that linkage is enormously important and that it is
usually the linkage, and wrong adjustment makes you think it is the
transmission.   At least you should work on that first since it only gets
you dirty and angry and doesn't directly cost you money.   The guides to
the gears are on the upper part of the box that is accessed under the spare
tire.  You can adjust the shifter by a little allen screw on the shift so
that the shifting mechanism in that box is pushed up to be influenced by
those guides.  Then when you push down the shift to go into reverse, you
are bypassing those guides.
The next problem is often the rod  that goes back to the tranny, and the
compression ring that allows the lateral movement of the shifter to
displace the vertical movement on the rod that goes into the tranny.  You
just have to play around with it (it is frustrating).  Basically, a tiny
adjustment on that ring influences whether or not a horizontal movement of
the gear translate into engaging the gears properly.  For my problem, my 85
Westy would not go into first gear, for love or money,  unless i pushed
down the shifter and bypassed the guide in that box.  I thought my tranny
was screwed up, but after dinking with it for several hours, I could see
that if I rotated the shaft in the correct direction, I could get the beast
in first without depressing the shift because I  had increased the distance
that the shift rod tranveled without so that I did not need to depress the
shifter to get enough distance to go into first gear.  Does that make any
sense whatsoever??
Call me if it still seems  weird.  (360-650-3641)
Don

From: Mark Brush <mbrush@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: 1990 Westy - do 3 transmissions have same problem?
I haven't dropped the shifter box yet. I've adjusted the shifter rod so tha=
t
the lower part of the stickshift is in the right place. It doesn't seem lik=
e
the stickshift hits anything in the box when in second gear.
With the last transmission I had, I wanted to check to see whether it was
the transmission, or the linkage. So I un-hooked the linkage, crawled under
the bus, and manually shifted the transmission into second. I started her
up, and let off on the clutch, and nothing happened - so I figured I had a
bad transmission (all the other gears engaged). Is this the best way to
check whether the problem is the trans or the linkage?