Broken gearbox casting where support plate mounts

[Beakster]

Hi,

I was just finishing off renewing my gearbox linkage and when I went to bomt in the support plate to the gearbox which holds the rear bush, the casting broke.

The van is new to me and it seems there is previous damage here. Has anyone dealt with the problem before? I obviously don't want to have to swap out the whole gear box for this.

I'm wondering if JB weld can do anything or if I need to find someone who can weld cast aluminium.

Thanks

[silverbullet]

Its quite common. A repair plate is available, BW probably carry them in stock.

[Beakster]

Thanks, yes just found and ordered one https://brickwerks.co.uk/product/gear-l ... ase-saver/

I'm a bit confused about how to fit it though. It seems that I remove 2 of the bolts from the gearbox, put the plate in position then put the bolts back in. I assume this then leaves me with the plate up against my broken lugs.

As the lugs are still broken it's going to be tricky to make this work as when I tighten up the bolts, there isn't enough of a shoulder left on the lugs for the heads to sit against.

I'm assuming that I will need to either grind off what's left of the lugs or build them back up again with epoxy?

[Beakster]

After investigating a bit more I think the best thing here is going to be to grind off what's left of the original lugs from the gear box so that the bolts only go between the brickwerks repair plate and the support plate.

The brickwerks kit include ones small bolt to use as they assume that the bottom mount has corroded away.  In my case most of the bottom mount is intact and its the upper mount which is useless.  But rather than trying to epoxy both of them I think it's going to make more sense to grind their remains off and use the repair plate only.

[silverbullet]

I though that the repair plate uses two different mounting holes to the original ones? Wouldn't be much use as a repair if it didn't.

[Beakster]

Here's some photos I've taken of the mounting plate in place to help anyone else out in future. You can see here where I've ground off the original mounting lugs so the bolt heads can sit flush against the new plate. I had to open the holes on the plate up very slightly with around file to get the new M8 bolts in.