Thread: "85 RRC LT77 No Reverse

in an effort to relieve my total dependence on my faithful '88 RRC i've purchased a second one, it is a Silver '85 3.5 Carb 5 spd.



after 5 summers of faultless service my current car (the blue one) is starting to get pretty wild in the handling department but I can't risk stripping anything down 'cos i have to drive it every day and despite it needing tyres, brakes, shocks, bushes, axles and driveline it just keeps plugging away.

so i picked the silver one up on ebay in full knowledge it had no reverse BUT with the promise of a spare gearbox to be included. i collected the car, fully prepared for warts and all and drove it the 50k or so home on a temporary registration. it drives really well and everything feels refreshingly tight, in marked contrast to my poor old girl. apart from having no indicators it is honestly close to having a stab at a roadworthy, depending on how well the underneath cleans up.

of course the first thing i did was get into the gear linkage and for about 30 minutes i thought i'd got lucky when one of the roll pins providing the pivot to the ball was clearly dislodged. a couple of reseating taps with a hammer and suddenly there was a lot less slap in the whole shift and i was genuinely hoping i'd got a fix but , no dice.
i read up on the detent ball giving problems and that proved gummed and sluggish so i re-greased it to good effect but without satisfaction in the going backwards stakes.

eventually i got down to the stick end of the selector rod and, with no detent and the reverse light switch wound out, i can get all gears easily by hand except reverse. the rod goes all the way home to bottom right no worries but there is no resistance and nothing 'clacks' in the box.
i know it should 'clack' because i've got the spare gearbox in the boot, haven't i ? i'd checked it at the pick up. it picked all its gears, lovely crisp splines on both input and output shafts and no apparent slack. i'd seen one before when i had an f-suffix lt77 put in my blue one and kept the original unit for a rainy day. only now though, after having worked on the '85 model's shifter do i realise i have been dudded a bit because the spare transmission is an e-suffix short-stick and, of course i soon realised the crucial difference ! ouch

so where to from here ? what are my options ?

a) pull the long-stick and get it fixed / find an exact replacement ?

b) put the short-stick in ? (luckily i have a old bell housing left from the blue car) but that will rather ruin the originality of the silver car.

c) scab everything from the LT230 down to the tyres off the silver one and concentrate on extending the blue one's servicability ?


any views ?

could the problem be something simple in the selector mechanism on the top of the box (i'm presuming that can be accessed by further stripping the transmission tunnel in situ ?) i cannot find any mention of an identical experience, lots of "can't get into the gate" relating to the detent mechanism etc.

anybody out there want to swap my short-stick box in ostensibly very good condition for a long-stick RRC unit ?

can somebody recommend someone clever enough to build a long-stick one out of the two ? i am on the surfcoast so preferably in victoria.

thanks Langy.

i'll start by stripping the 'left over' box that was from the '88. the mechanic who changed it reckoned it had been rebuilt and told me to keep it. in theory it was ok apart from the input shaft being bugga'd and i already had the replacement unit ready to go.