3/26/12
One Little Bolt

With all the gears removed from the transmission, I reassembled the case to get some fresh paint on the transmission. The paint is a dull silver paint, and the weather in the Northeast was nice enough to let the sun bake in the finish!

The bushing in the shifter needed replacing, which is a common problem, but as I dug deeper, I found more issues.

The gear lever had a lot of strange grease and glue and when I removed all the gunk, I found why the previous mechanic used so much.

The bolt that secured one of the linkages had sheared off, and the previous mechanic simply glued it back in place instead of fixing this issue properly. The glued in bolt left a lot of slop in the linkage, and I was surprised it even worked. The first step towards a proper repair was to carefully drill out the piece of bolt left inside the shifter rod.

I managed to extract the broken piece without damaging the existing threads. Here it is next to its mate that was not broken.

Unfortunately, these bolts are not common bolts. They have a shoulder that indexes the shifter rod, and a fine pitch thread. The time it would take to find a bolt would be better spent making the right bolt and it began with finding a bolt with the correct diameter shoulder. The top bolt in this picture is the one I wanted to copy, and the bottom bolt was a hardened bolt we found with the correct shoulder. The next step was to machine the diameter of the bolt down so the threads could be cut at the correct dimension.

Here’s the replacement bolt cut down to size before I cut the threads. With everything installed, the shifter mechanism works as it should without any slop in the mechanism, and I didn’t have to use any goop!

Set the Date!
Saturday May 5th 2012
The Radcliffe/Tomyang.net Spring Car Show
The 5th Annual show brought to you by car guys, for car guys
12340 Owings Mills Boulevard
Reisterstown, Maryland 21136
Phone: 410-517-1681
Register Early for Show Cars, spectators are free!

Reminder: If you have a Ferrari related project, car, or idea you’d like to explore, I’d love to talk to you. I can also help if you’re thinking of buying or selling. This website represents what I love to do, and now it’s how I make a living, so if you’d like to do something together, let me know. It all begins with an e-mail!

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