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My GSL-SE transmission is full of glitter and making bad noises, so I picked up an FC NA transmission to replace it with. Because of the different positions of the shifter, I removed the tail housing from each transmission so I could use my GSL-SE tail housing on the FC transmission and correctly locate the shifter and transmission mount. However, I realized the GSL-SE tail housing does not quite fit on the FC transmission, despite a lot of forum threads saying these parts are interchangeable. The FC transmission output shaft appears to have some kind of counterweight that the GSL-SE does not have, and the tail housing makes contact with it slightly. It seems the FC part has about 1/4" more space to account for this.
How can I resolve this? The way I see it, I can put the GSL-SE shifter extension on the FC tail housing to correctly locate the shifter, then fabricate a transmission mount (which I'd prefer not to do). Otherwise, I could try to remove the counterweight on the FC output shaft, but I am hesitant to do so without knowing more about why it's there or what impact that would have.
Left if the FC transmission, right is the GSL-SE transmission.
I haven't seen that before either. It's called a "dynamic damper" and some S5 boxes came with them and some didn't.
Seems safe to remove. Also found only a couple of threads mentioning it and no one knows for sure if it's necessary. Here's one from 2008 putting an S5 tranny into an SA
Thank you! Looks like for turbo transmissions there is more info I had missed, and even though this is an NA trans the dynamic damper info seems to still apply. I'll just remove it.
Also – I just noticed you're in Austin also. Hopefully I'll find you at a future rotary meet or cars and coffee
Are you on the facebook group? A new guy has taken over and organized a meetup earlier this month and wants to make it a regular thing.
One of the gold FBs is moving to CO so another 1st gen is needed.
Do yourself a favor, though. Knock the roll pins out of the shift fingers just enough to slide them off, so you can remove the mid housing. Then stick a wrench on the five bolts that hold the bearing retainer to the main plate. They LOVE to loosen up and back out. I have taken to replacing them with much longer 8.8 bolts (stock are made with frozen peanut butter, I think) and Loctite. This requires much deeper disassembly to get the bolts in around the mainshaft bearing side, which are the ones that back out. Acceleration forces push the mainshaft bearing back against the plate. When the bolts back out, the mainshaft can rack back and forth (you will feel this as the shifter moving back and forth under acceleration/deceleration) and it is "retained" by 1st gear rubbing on the main plate, which puts a lot of aluminum powder in the oil.
When I replace them I torque to 30lb. There no spec that I can find but the stock length bolts would probably pull the threads out before you got that high. Just get whatever you can with a box wrench or open end wrench.
