What to look for in a transmission

[psimet]

Originally Posted by Synchro909

When I took delivery of my 1928 Tudor, I checked everything before starting it and found that the oil in the gearbox was LOW. The teeth of the big gear at the front of the bottom shaft were just dipping oil. Every tooth in there was pitted and the oil that was in there was full of sparkly bit of gears. In the whole time he had owned he car, the previous owner had not checked the oil. .
These gearboxes are tougher than we expect. I flushed it several times till I got almost no metal flakes when I drained it and installed a magnet on the drain plug. I put a set of new bearings though it and drove on. Nearly 20,000 miles since and it is still going just fine with no nasty noises. If $ are short, IMO, there is no need to replace much in there now. It can wait.

We did a spring safety check for our local club. It was fun and really got me laying eyes on the mechanicals on a lot of running A’s. At first I was shocked at the number of them that had low or almost no oil in the transmissions (along with loose wheel bearings, no grease, low oil, etc).

I’m in the cycling industry and we have the same thing with people that just ride their bikes and never do maintenance or think of repairs. My favorite quote from that crowd is, “I have people for that”. In that world I’m their “people”.

It slowly made sense to me that even though so much of this hobby is centered around working on these cars there is still a heavy dose of “I have people for that” sentiment and general neglect of routine maintenance.

I left that safety check once again reminded that as long as you throw something remotely flammable in the engine that these things really will keep running.

After spending all this time I absolutely would have kept running the gears I originally had but I am glad that I did swap them for this restoration.