Recommendations of firms to recondition my original SIII gearbox?

[Ed Poore]

They are cowards, the dog barks and worries, meanwhile the bitch (littermate) goes for hamstrings - as I say, vicious.

Back from Cardiff, and I have to say, the staff in Machine Mart there are superb, knowledgeable and approachable, it's a pleasant change from some of their other branches. I have purchased a propane torch and a couple of rubber/plastic hammers (have you seen the price of copper hammers?!). I need to find a gas bottle now, and then we'll be off!

Anyway - once I get around to disassembling I'll start a new thread, unless someone else starts one first!!

G.

I rebuilt the gearbox on my 88" over the summer (unfortunately was on rather a tight schedule so didn't get much opportunity to take photos) but didn't need to do much other than replace the main bearing on the input shaft.

One tip regarding that bearing in particular is it helps massively to freeze the bearing and the input shaft, I luckily had two places locally where I had access to a 20t, 50t and 150t hydraulic presses. Basically the procedure was to freeze the bearing, press into bell-housing, heat bearing (just used boiling water underneath in a jug and then poured some on) and then put the frozen input shaft into the bearing.

Went in surprisingly easily (to the point if you're confident of hitting it in square you could do it with a hammer and some blocks of wood). The only worrying bit we had initially was it seemed to "jerk" in and then we realised that it was the cold bearing temporarily freezing on the bell-housing.

Now got an R380 to do but might just get an exchange unit for that one since I need to minimise downtime.