Here is how I fixed it in my '84

1.  Ham-fisted car "mechanic" broke the front shifter plastic base ball socket thingy. I cleaned his grease from  my Westy and replaced the ball and socket assembly.  
2.  Pulled the plastic tube couplers from horn joints. They had too much play so I sanded them down a tiny bit and installed stainless washers at ends for very snug fit. 
3. Replaced shaft bushings with delrin bushings. They need a regular lube, but are fantastic. 
4. Rear ball and socket replaced with a GoWesty cu$tom unit. 

The results were synergistic. 

Chris.

Wysłane z iPhone'a

Dnia Oct 2, 2014 o godz. 0:41 Tom Young <tomyoung1@COMCAST.NET> napisał(a):

> Hi all:
> 
> 
> 
> I've been struggling with poor shifting, i.e., it's difficult to "find" 1st
> and 2nd gear.   A couple of weeks ago I pulled the entire shifter mechanism
> out of the vehicle, (that's the gear shift lever and the bearings), and
> noted that it was pretty "sticky", so I swapped in the shifter mechanism
> from my old Vanagon which was a lot smoother.  Unfortunately that didn't
> cure things.  In the meantime I've pulled apart the Westy shifter mechanism,
> cleaned everything and greased it up with moly disulfide.  It's slick as
> snot now (to use the technical term) and I'll re-install it later, but I
> know that's not going to change things.
> 
> 
> 
> So today I pulled everything related to shifting out of the vehicle and
> started to look at the bits.  From front to back:
> 
> 
> 
> 1)      The "horns" on the front selector shaft look fine to me.  I've
> posted a few shots of this portion of the front selector shaft at
> http://1drv.ms/1xDiHMh .  The shaft from the Westy is at the top of the
> first 3 pictures and the shaft from my old Vanagon - which had no shifting
> issues - is at the bottom.  If anyone disagrees with my assessment here I'd
> appreciate the feedback.
> 
> 2)      The bushing through which the middle selector shaft passes, (that's
> the one above the gas tank), also looks fine, looking at it from above the
> spare tire.  I'll see if I can't clean and re-lube it using some dowels and
> rags, but I doubt that has anything to do with the shifting problems.
> 
> 3)      The two bushings used to connect the front and middle selector
> shafts are intact.  The articulation between the shafts seems a little
> sticky, but since these bushings are NLA I'm afraid to try and pull the
> shafts apart; I broke the top bushing on the Vanagon linkage doing that, not
> realizing these were "soft parts".  Can the shafts be separated without
> breaking these bushings?
> 
> 4)      At the rear the guide pin seems to be perfectly OK.  The only part
> that had had any obvious wear was the top ball of the shift bracket (part
> 251-711-219); there's a pair of pretty obvious flat spots on the ball on the
> sides facing the transmission and facing away from the transmission.  You
> can see a couple of shots of the shift bracket at the same link as above.
> The straight on shot of the shift bracket shows that the top ball is about
> 1mm smaller in diameter than the bottom ball.  The second shot shows the
> size of the flat spot itself.
> 
> 
> 
> I hate to be a parts replacer without a pretty good understand that
> replacing the part will fix things.  I just don't have a good enough
> understanding of the entire shift mechanism to say with any confidence that
> these flat spots are the source of the shifting problem.  Does anybody have
> an opinion, one way or the other?
> 
> 
> 
> Tom Young