I'd second that. The speedo drive on VW boxes of that sort is plastic IIRC. The labour to drop the box and open it will cost you probably a couple of hundred or more. If it breaks, get a SH box (lots about for VW diesels), and get that fitted. I'd be tempted to run it a while then drain the oil, if there's a drain plug.
Hi,
Try a flexible picker like the first one (or similar) showing on the page here. If you spend enough time you will grab the gadget ... if you can it out of the g/box is another story.
Thank you for that. Suggesting I could be anywhere near Carol "I'll Flog Anything For A Fiver" Vorderman has made me realise that having a foreign body in my transmission isn't really that bad after all. :-)
Ta for the idea but I think it's a non-starter. I'd need one of the ones with grabber claws and that would also go round a corner, because wherever the little plastic bastard has gone, it's not visible down the hole.
I did wonder whether I could maybe get my small inspection mirror down there and at least see where it's gone. Maybe if I new where it was, and had a telescopic grabber...probably won't work but I won't discount it.
Well, I took everyone's advice and drove it the ten miles to work this morning and apart from nonfunctioning speedo you wouldn't have noticed any difference. Then when I came to drive it home it was extremely reluctant to go into 1st or 2nd gears - it's never done this before so I figure it must have been to do with the little plastic bastard knocking about inside the transmission (guy in work advises it's probably actually nylon FWIW). However I managed with some brute force to get it in, it was the same for about the first few hundred yards going into 1st or 2nd, after which the problem went away and hasn't come back.
So does this mean the little plastic bastard has decided to mess with something metal in the gearbox and come off worse and is now smashed to smithereens?
At a guess, yes.
Change the oil in the box this weekend - you'll probably find little mashed up bits of plastic everywhere.
I think I could put up with her, (f)or her money .
The message from "Vim Fuego" contains these words:
Seems likely.
I would certainly hope so! Incidentally - isn't nylon a type of plastic?
Probably
Strange. The car has now done this several times - been extremely difficult to get into and out of 1st and 2nd, for the first couple of minutes and/or first few changes into and out of those gears... and then the problem completely disappears for the rest of the journey...then when I start up again (which might be as little as a minute or two later), it does it again. What's all that about then?
I'm figuring I should change the transmission oil this weekend anyway, just on general principles.
Maybe it's getting stuck in and out of some selector linkage somewhere and hasn't actually been magimixed yet.
I only just read this thread. Before discovering that you drove off and mashed it up, I was going to suggest that nylon/plastic probably floats on oil, so if you poured oil in the top until it was absolutely full, the widget might have got near enough to the hole to be visible or accessible.
This still might be worth a try, especially if you're changing the oil anyway. Rotating the gears and moving the gear lever around might liberate bits of the plastic.
How do you rotate the gears? Taking out the spark plugs and pushing the car up and down the drive in 4th gear would be one way.
Unlikely. The lowest figure I can find for the density of nylon is 1.15g/cc (wikipedia). The only figure for the density of gearbox oil I can be bothered to find is
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