more cheap tricks (shift linkage)

[treed2@u.washington.edu (T. Reed)]

Here's the second and final installment..

My shifter is now down to 1/16" side-to-side play and no front-to-back
play. The side-to-side play is coming from wear to the ball joints in the
L-shaped pivot assembly with the plastic rods (the plastic rods are new,
so I'm assuming the metal balls themselves are worn). I might replace the
ball thingies at some point, but for now I'm more than happy with my
linkage.

TIP #6 - under the car, directly beneath the shift lever are a pair of
black "top hat" bushings that I've already replaced. Unfortunately,
neither that nor replacing the whole shift lever assembly cured the
small amount of play introduced by this part of the linkage. So today, I
pulled it all apart and tried to fix it. There were no holes out of round,
but the bushings simply weren't a tight enough fit. Unable to find a
thin enough washer of the right diameter, I grabbed a piece of
appropriately thick stainless steel, nibbled it in to a small square with
tin snips, and drilled a hole in it to make it sort of like a washer.
This would have worked great.. except that with my big hands it was
impossible the get the washer in the small crack between the pieces and
hold everything still at the same time. So.. enter cyanoacrylate ester.
You can find this stuff for about 3 bucks at Radio Shack as bottle of
"brush-on future glue" or at Home Depot as "bondini the magic brush-on
glue". It's all the same stuff, but its very useful. It's like super glue
on crack. Dries in 15 seconds, bonds everything (eyes and skin included,
as noted on the bottle). It produces a lot of heat and evil smelling
fumes in the process so be careful. So basically, I glued the washer to
the bushing. Duh. It worked well, though. I had to hammer on the thing a
bit to get it to fit in.. but when it did, I sat in the car and shifted
and it feels like the tranny is right under the shifter.

TIP #7 - shift linkage adjustment. this is a biggie. fortunately, though..
its a lot easier than people make it out to be. Grab a 13mm wrench and a
13mm socket on a t-handle and take off the clamp bolt. Then, go under the
shift lever and move it so that the front-to-back position of the joint is
parallel to the exact middle of the lockout plate. Grab a pair of
plastic calipers and set them for 15mm and flip the little lock thingy on
so they stay exactly at 15mm. Adjust the linkage so that there is an
exactly 15mm gap between the lockout plate and the joint. I hear a
cassette tape case works for this but I had no trouble just using the
calipers. What I learned here, though.. is that for my car at least it had
to be exactly 15mm. Not 13mm, not 16mm, not 14.333mm. Exactly 15mm. I
could still shift with other adjustments but 15mm made the shifting smooth
and easy in all gears.

So what's left? Well.. I'm still getting used to the tightness of the
linkage - the downside of the slop being gone is that there's no
"swing zone" like there used to be so the force to shift seems higher
since you start pushing immediately. I'm considering increasing the mass
of my shift weight to see if this helps (don't know that it will, though).

I'm also going to be building a short shift kit. I don't have a welder so
it will be a carefully designed adapter to fit on the end of my relay arm.
Speaking of which.. all the short shift kits I see have a lever that looks
like this:

	SIDE VIEW:				TOP VIEW:
===------------------(---)--
| |
| |
| |
| |					+-------------------------------+
| |					|			  /  \	|
| |					|			  \  /	|
| |					+-------------------------------+
| |
| |
| |
| |


On my car, the side view is the same but the top view is all crooked, like
this:

+--------------------------_____
|			       \_
|				 \_______
+--------------------------____	   /  \	 |
			      \__  \  /	 |
				 '-------

It's not just smashed sideways.. it was actually cut so that there was a
diagonal part there on the end.

What's the dilly?

Is this a 16v thing (to clear the downpipe or something?) or is it just
some random mutation that my car has?

I wonder because I never see short shift kits that say "all A1 except
Scirocco 16v"..

Anyone know?

-Toby