Thread: Series III gearbox and clutch advice needed

Originally Posted by 87County

no questions are dumb mate - most of us learn by asking them

<snip>

any of the S2/3 gearboxes can mate with any of the S2/3 bellhousings , so choose a bellhousing appropriate to your engine

hopefully other expertise from others will be added

Pretty close to everything one wants to know, except that you need to swap like for like. i.e. you can swap a SIII 4 cyl with a SIII 6 cyl and a SIIa 4 cyl with a SIIa 6 cyl, or even a SI petrol engine bellhousing (which will fit to a Land Rover 6 cyl engine) with a SII 2 1/4 litre bellhousing. However outside those swaps there are issues with the type of clutch throw-out, differences in the gearbox primary pinion or even size of the layshaft front bearing.

Originally Posted by pfillery

Maybe check your transfer lever. My car was reportedly jumping out of gear when in fact it was the transfer disengaging into neutral, or partly into neutral. I had to trim a cm of floor out from in front of the transfer lever so it could move all the way forward properly - aparently on some holden conversions the engine/gearbox sits about 2 cm further forward than the normal setup, hence when the lever is engaged it can touch the floor under the boot and is easilly jarred back out of position. My red transfer lever now almost touches the firewall but locks positively into place when engaged. Might be worth checking.

A related problem I found was that when installing the transfer lever rubber boot (commonly found on ebay at the moment) the rubber was so stiff it forced the transfer lever back into neutral.

I got around it by cutting the little tit off the top of the boot, cutting a slit along the top, and punching extra holes in the boot to match low and high gears.

Peter

Originally Posted by peterg1001

A related problem I found was that when installing the transfer lever rubber boot (commonly found on ebay at the moment) the rubber was so stiff it forced the transfer lever back into neutral.

I got around it by cutting the little tit off the top of the boot, cutting a slit along the top, and punching extra holes in the boot to match low and high gears.

Peter

Some of those replacement parts on ebay look a little cheap and junky don't they. I think some of the retailers that advertise on here and some others I've found on the web have better prices anyway than some of the ebay ones, often half the price and far less postage (some of those boots are selling for $12 on ebay with $10-12 postage, whereas they are $$6 or $7 elsewhere)

I'm wondering about doortops and how good some of the $110 ones are on ebay, often not easy to tell from the pics. Thankfully my transfer boot is ok although my handbrake one is tatty and my main gear one is cracked, not that it really covers much anyway.