Daytona Gears and Synchronizers
I’ve been spending some time working with Francois learning all the subtleties of rebuilding a Ferrari transmission. If you recall, I started over a year ago with 250/330 transmissions and even with my personal car. The tutelage continues today with a Daytona transaxle. The problem is rebuilding these is not only tricky, but the replacement parts are not consistent and vary from supplier to supplier. I don’t believe there is any way to know if these parts will work until they are assembled and tested in the gearbox, so it’s tough to know what will work and what will not!
With no original parts available, everyone is relying on reproduction parts that may have been created using old parts and not the original drawings. As we assembled the replacement sychronizers and dog rings, we found the parts were locking together before pressure was applied to engage the gear! These parts were obviously not going to work.
Luckily, Francois had a set of NOS Daytona synchronizer rings that seem to have the correct clearance not to make contact with the dog ring prematurely. We should be able to assemble this transmission without any problems, but when we run out of NOS parts, we and everyone else we service are going to have a problem! I would love to hear from other people in the Ferrari community if they’re having problems like this or if they have a supplier that is supplying good proven parts. I suspect there are really one or two parts suppliers that have these parts, and everyone is buying the same supply. If that’s the case, we may have a bigger problem if none of these parts work!
Ugh!