Gear Selector falling out of place since PAS

[Ben Lessani]

Hi guys,

As a positive, I'm MOT'ed - went through 1st time, after 5 months of being out of action. Good stuff! However, I have a little gear adjustment issue. Before you post "search search", I know how to adjust the gears, and its not an issue - but I'm a little confused.



Now, the above photo is an old one, from when I changed the gear selector. I bought the new selector from GSF and remember it being a bit higher up than the OEM one, like so...



It had never posed a problem until now. The selector ball/relay is about 3/4" too high out of the cup part of the linkage, so when I try to engage reverse or 5th, the ball comes completely out of the cup/selector and I need to pop the bonnet and push it back in. 1st and 3rd go in perfect, 2nd and 4th feel like I'm dragging it through mud, 5th and reverse are a 1 in 10 game of luck whether it engages, or dismantles all together.

Now what I need to know is, is this just because of GSF's odd sized parts, or does the PAS rack sit lower/higher than the manual rack - affecting the height it should normally sit at.

[mk2mark]

I'd reccommend going back to the other shaft and getting one of my bushes - but it's semi-important to figure out if the rack is in the wrong place as you'll get bump steer.

[Ben Lessani]

I can't use my old gear selector for this reason...

http://www.golfgtiforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=49436.msg497188#msg497188

The rack is positioned right, its got captive bolts on the subframe - so its pretty hard to go wrong. I'm going to go and inspect it properly now and see why its happening. Was there two different versions of the selector, at different heights?

[Ben Lessani]

So I pulled the selector mech off the car and low and behold - the reason it was popping out was because the GSF part was simply too tall,



...and it had caused the bottom of the relay ball to foul on the metal plate simply wearing it away.



My OEM shaft was bent - so I based it a few times with a hammer to straighten it up. I popped the ball off the GSF shaft but it wouldn't clip back on to the OEM. So, as a temporary measure I drilled a hole in the middle, tapped it and put a bolt in, with the ball upside down. I managed to judge the hole dead centre with a hand drill!