Hi all:

Some background:

I bought this Westy several years ago and noted that getting into 1st, 2nd
and reverse was just slightly difficult.  Not horrible, just not as easy as
the sifting I experience with the air-cooled Vanagon I owned at the same
time.  Since I had a fairly new AA Transaxle rebuild in the Vanagon and was
intending to get rid of it, I swapped the rebuilt transmission into the
Westy.  Nothing changed as far as the shifting went so I've always put that
down to some slight imperfection in the shifting setup.  In fact, up until a
couple of weeks ago I blamed that problem on what I thought was a missing
bushing - the one that lives over the gas tank - because there always seemed
to be a rattle somewhere in the shifting mechanism that I could quiet down
by putting my hand on the shifter.

The shifting turned dramatically worse 2 or 3 weeks ago so I figured it was
time to fix that "missing" bushing.  Only thing is when I finally dropped
the belly pan that guards the gas-fired heater and got a look at the
bushing, it was in place and looked to be in good condition, looking at it
over the gas tank.  (You can see photos of it here
http://tinyurl.com/nwjmhdc ).

I removed the shifter and bearing plate assembly and the whole thing seemed
rather gunky and sticky so I replace the shifter and bearing plate with one
that I had salvaged from the old Vanagon, and did the 2-step linkage
adjustment specified by all the books.  Only, that didn't help at all.  I'm
really fighting to get into 1st, but I'm not getting any indication,
noise-wise or feel-wise, that it's a transmission problem.

I suppose one of the 3 shifter rods could have somehow gotten bent, but that
seems very unlikely and, in any case, I certain nothing happed in that
regard 2 or 3 weeks ago.

Anybody have some other thoughts as to the problem here?

Tom Young