BX gearbox swap.

alan s · Post by **alan s** » 20 Apr 2005, 16:04

A mate of mine had a BX he bought with an auto gearbox.
It's a nice car with low klms but the transmission has died.
Out here, BXs are still worth money and repairs are commonly rorted. The cost to repair according to the "experts" can be as much as A$4,500 which makes it impractical.
He decided it was a better option to fit a second hand gearbox so took it to a "specialist" to have it done. The box that was found for him was a BE1 from a Trs, his car is a TZi.
It wasn't until the box arrived and they were installing it that the penny dropped. The gearbox was off a carby car but was going into an EFi vehicle.
The problems this created was that firstly the flywheel was incorrect as it didn't have the teeth (60 minus 2) for the TDC sensor and there was no hole in the bellhousing for the sensor to fit.
They found another flywheel and bellhousing, but now reckon it won't fit so they disembowelled the gearbox and stuffed it into the housing they bought (attached to the bellhousing I presume) and now they reckon there's strange noises coming from second gear.
Question; should this be really such a drama? I would have thought once the flywheel was found, that a hole carefully drilled into the bellhousing would have sorted the sensor problem but they refused to do it. My argument was that as there are a few degrees of adjustment on the distributor of the TZi that any slight variances could be tuned out of it.
Any thoughts or suggestions as he's been without a car for a month now and needs it for work.
I'm fresh out of ideas although so far nobody seems to be able to justify this amount of trouble doing what appears to be a fairly straight-forward job
Alan S

bernie · Post by **bernie** » 20 Apr 2005, 16:16

Obviously they put oil in the gearbox?

alan s · Post by **alan s** » 20 Apr 2005, 16:37

Never thought of that Bernie and knowing some of our "spcialists" it wouldn't surprise me as one did that to me years ago.
The bit that is mystifying would have to be that they stuffed a BE1 innards into a BE3 casing. Now to me, if the reverse gear is in a different position, I'd imagine the innards wouldn't be identical, but on that I'm not sure(and obviously neither are they).
Alan S

oilyspanner · Post by **oilyspanner** » 20 Apr 2005, 16:37

I thought the TDC sensor came in from the engine side near the speedo drive?, not overly familiar with the petrol variants though
Stewart

PeterMann · Post by **PeterMann** » 20 Apr 2005, 18:36

I'm with you on this one Alan ; should be a simple matter to retrofit TDC sensor. It will be an inductive proximity sensor that is looking for either a bump or a gap in the flywheel. Drilling a small hole in a bell housing is most unlikely to create a weakness that might eventually cause a structural failure. The hole for the sensor just has to match the detected feature on the flywheel when the pistons are at TDC.