Broken gear linkage,

Post by **dalahare** » 10 Apr 2006 07:58 am

The bracket that holds the gear linkage on (85 360 glt) has craked, i can only just select gears using all of the available travel, i have pulled the centre console out and got everything exept the shifter itself out of the way so i can see whats going on, basically it looks like it can only be fixed two ways, the properway would be to pull the torque tube out and the shifter linkages/ brakcet out and do it, but that's a bit more than i am capale of here at home by myself, the other looks likeit woulb be just to try and weld it from the top, problem is that i can't get to all of the crack, i can only see a tiny bit of it, i think i read somewhere on here that someone cut away a little bit of the transmission tunnel to gain acces then rewelded that too, is there a better way? don't really wanna butcher the car. plus i'd have to strip all the carpet out of the car so that i didn't burn it rewelding the tunnel.

Post by **Fuse** » 10 Apr 2006 10:00 am

Has it gotten of from the torque tube or is the plate thingy it self cracked?

I had both.. I don't have welding equipments and I didn't want to take out the whole drivetrain for just to fix that so I bolted the whole linkage holder on to the body of the car.

Worked fine. I also fabricated an extra bracket above. Somebody said that if I bolt it straight on to the body, it might cause some resonance but I haven't had anything. It is bolted on body in 340s too so I don't see why it would cause any more resonances in 360.

Now it is much better, feels like I had gotten a whole new gearbox and the stick doesn't hit the edge of centre console anymore...

I don't think there are any other ways to fix it than weld above, cut and weld above, bolt the whole plate on to the body from above or the "proper" way and take out the drivetrain and fix it below.

Zimba fixed his by welding the gear leveler on to the body and welding in some reinforcment bars and it worked fine too. There's a pic of what he did.

http://students.oamk.fi/~kosipe00/kuvat/360_4.jpg

Mine's kinda same except I used self drilling bolts and made an extra bracket out of metal above.

Here are some pics which BASS sent me which gives the idea what's under there as it is hard to see from that little hole above.

http://koti.mbnet.fi/mtn/images/volvo/3 ... %20001.jpg I had that plate cracked and the connection between that plate and the torque tube had failed. So I bolted that plate straight on to the body.

http://koti.mbnet.fi/mtn/images/volvo/3 ... %20003.jpg There's the connection which had failed in this car too. I don't understand why the stock connection is so weak design.

http://koti.mbnet.fi/mtn/images/volvo/3 ... %20002.jpg There's a pic from below. As can be seen, failure had been fixed above in this car too by cutting the tunnel.

Post by **Bilbo** » 10 Apr 2006 05:12 pm

my bros 360 has done this twice. the first time someone cut a bit of the tunnel and pulled back to weld the bracket back on. then they welded the tunnel back together.
after a week of having the car the weld snapped so "I" cut some alloy plate and self tappered it to tunnel ,to hold the selector rod in place. works well and only took about 10mins. we've done 2 road rallys and 2 12 car rallys and had no selection problems[yet]. every now and again you can hear the bracket rattling,but thats no hardship.
if you want to do it right i think you have to take the box/diff out ,then the torq tube off to refix bracket ,but it will take some time to do!!

Post by **foggyjames** » 10 Apr 2006 07:13 pm

It's perfectly possible to remove it without taking the gearbox out, but I think you may have to lower it a little. The advice is to get hold of a scrapper spare, and get that one welded up with extra bracing. Swap them over, and you still have a spare for repair

Mine had a brand new linkage 2 years ago. Not cheap

cheers

James

Post by **dalahare** » 11 Apr 2006 05:23 am

Thanks for the advice, I did it today, took about an hour all up, I cut two slots into the tunnel and bent it up so i could get to the crack, welded it up fairly well but there was still alot of movement in the gear lever, the rear of the bracket would still move up and down considerably whilst selcting gears, so i welded a small falt bar to the rear, similar to the bolt in the first pics that fuse posted, and a samll brace at the front also, a quick drive revelaed it works great now, but there is some noise coming thru there from vibrations, also possibly that i broke the front two clips that hold the surround down so its not on too well.