Thread: Binding when reversing

Originally Posted by discorevy

Centre diff hasn't engaged inadvertently?, though you'd feel that through the steering on a hard surface.

My first post on aulro was related to this.

Had weird mild tyre wear.............. thought alignment.............. on the machine............... the man says cdl locked.

Can't be ...............the light isn't on.

Yeah I know now that's really funny, but I hadn't had it long and a mate's 7yo son had been in it on his own.

Drove it nearly 1000 k's and the only noticeable things were the tyre wear and a very slight vibration @ 100 km/h, or so, on bitumen.

There was no difference in steering feel at all and it didn't have PS at the time.

I can't remember which front wheel gets jacked up and 'spun' to see if it's locked atm.

The light has worked on mine for 20 something years now.

cheers, DL

I've got an r380 here from a donor rossignol some years back - which suffered the same symptom as Don130 quoted above - failed layshaft bearing. Being helical cut, the gears will climb over themselves due to the axial thrust created - effectively trying to force the shaft out through the box and if bad enough, you'll be stripping teeth.

The issue was reverse gear bind.

Best if you drop your gearbox oil, check the drain plug magnet (if you have one fitted) for sparkles and then flush the box out with diesel/petrol / solvent and let it dry (compressed air can help) then poke a camera up inside to see if you have any ground teeth edges.

If your box is OK and there is no shaft movement (screwdriver test) then make sure you add some AW-10 to the fluid. I am a fan of using low-vis GL-4 75w simply to keep the box quiet - I'd prefer to run the 7wt Neo Synthetic but the distributor down in Sydney is impossible to get hold of nowadays, ordering it from the US is a PITA. So I dose up on the AW-10 at 7.5% and run full synthetic GL-4 75-90 penrite in the manual box, as there is no point in shelling out $400 for the Neo ATF (which is the same stuff used in the xtrac gearboxes).

I do fear that you have the same bearing failure - it may be only just starting, but it will get worse. Best thing to do is budget for an ashcroft rebuilt box - which is still cheaper than every single quote I've had to get an R380 rebuild done locally (and to top things off, you know the ashcroft box is going to have fixed ALL the inherent issues that come in an R380).

That binding up in reverse is a concern - especially if you have eliminated the handbrake drum.