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MG MGB GT V8 Factory Originals Technical - Gearbox mounts

In the V* Conversion book the instructions are to offset the Gearbox mounts for the SD1 box by 14mm to the left.

Why is this? I am looking at the instructions which came with the my mounts and they just have them centrally located either side of the x-member centre.

Which should I follow?

Liam
Liam

Liam,

I fitted the mounts for the LT77 box to the std. B crossmember and moved the cm forward. I did not use any offset to one side on my conversion.
May be it was a little bit easyer in the early 1980's when I did my conversion. There were no "specialistst" and books for a V8 conv. in reach...

Anyway, the gearbox mounts lasted for 15 years until becoming soft and then I changed for new ones (OEM SD1). Everything is still working fine.

Ralph
Ralph

Do not do this!!!!!!!!
I did and got caught out badly (do you feel the angst off all those exclaimation marks?).
The reason is that the base of the MGB gear lever is off set 14mm to the portside, so the hole in the tranny tunnel is also off set 14mm to the portside.
The well meaning intent of the book is to alighn the gear lever with the tranny hole by pushing the tranny over.
The problem is that if you are using a bigger stronger tail shaft this will not allow sufficient clearance. It does work. I drove around semi-legaly for a while with about 1mm clearance between the shaft and the tunnel wall. In the archives there is some mention of harmonic vibrations due to missalighned tail shaft U joints, I never detected this so that really isn't a problem.
The real difficulty is that if you require an engineers certificate or some sort of roadworthy, he will spot this lack of clearance in an instant and tell you to fix it. If you are lucky he might miss it, I was not lucky. So out came the engine and gearbox and I got to re-do all my crossmember adapting!!!.

I did end up keeping a little off set (about 4 to 5mm) so that I could centralise the tail shaft between the portside of the tranny tunnel and the hand brake bolt, which sticks out a fair way from the starboard side of the tranny tunnel.
I also pushed the box up high enough so that the gear lever had sufficient room to move, even though it was displaced 10mm to the right relative to its hole. It worked out well enough so that you can't see the offset, unless you know it's there.
However since then the center consol/armrest has developed a couple of cracks (old age/sun) and I've noticed that a few people have addressed this problem by recovering it with vinyl and hiding the join by having a vinyl covered bit of ply to entirely cover the flat section. This is held in place by the gear lever rubber boot surround. Aside from covering any unwanted cracks and holes, this actually looks better than orrigional. One guy even extended the sides of the radio consol right back and put in some directional vents for the footwell coolair vent. The point of telling you this is that I would have been better off simply shifting the tranny tunnel hole and recovering the centre consol!
Peter

We have the similar problem with the gear shift on the Chevy T-5 transmission used frequently Stateside. The fix is to disassemble the shifter, cut the lever and weld in a spacer then weld it all back together with the lever itself spaced sideways to center in the hole in the transmission. The base of the shifter fits as original in the transmission, at a point about 1" above the shifter top plate the lever jogs to the side.

About an hour's work if you are slow.
Jim Stuart

Good point Jim,
That reminds me that the RV8 has a kink in it's lever to move it about an inch further forward, and that uses a Rover Box.
Peter

I cut my S10 shifter base from D&D in two places & welded it back with a built-in dogleg. Dead center in neutral.

Hand brake nut was replaced with a thinner jam nut. Excess bolt was cut off. No more pimgimg off the driveshaft on bumps. Took a while to figure out what that noise was. ;)
Carl Floyd

This thread was discussed between 01/04/2006 and 02/04/2006

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