The S3 Beach Bus, and so it begins......

Oh heck. 3 years since an update! Lots of shenanigans since then.
Some of the excuses for not updating are,
Changed job to a more intense one
Gearbox went. This was a fairly major job as I keep the truck a few miles from my house and there is always something you need that you leave back home in your garage when working away.
Bought a 3d printer and spent time faffing with that. Did a project for the truck which sort of worked but exposed the limitations of the printing filament used so didn't really work.
Indulged in another restoration project that is possibly too nerdy for me to admit to the world on the web.
2 of the children needing help through two different years of GCSEs
Covid - no excuse to visit the truck for a few months.
I've got old, where does the bl**dy time go.....

Anyway, one thing we did do with the Beach Bus last year was use it for a socially distanced drive in movie at Goodwood. The film was Le Mans 66 which was all the more poignant given the venue. There were a good number of classics cars there that really added to the petrolhead atmosphere. We rolled the side of the roof up, sat back and enjoyed. Even the girls liked it. Apologies for the poor quality of the photos taken on my phone. Hopefully they give an idea of what it was like.

The first issue we had after my last post was a gearbox with random gears available. First to go was third gear which came back after a while, we then had various become unavailable with third coming back. Eventually it got stuck in fourth and wouldn't come out. I did hope initially that it was a problem with the selector forks, possibly the spring loaded bearings that stop two gears being selected at once. Stripping the top of the gearbox revealed these to be fine. I therefore concluded that I was going to have to take the gearbox out.

Due to the bus being stranded at a friends I decided to remove the gearbox by removing the chassis cross member and dropping the gearbox out with the aid of ratchet straps and a trolley jack. I didn't fancy lugging my engine crane down there.

Dropping the box out was relatively straight forward, the main issues being bolts that had corroded in place. After a fair bit of spanner and rachet twirling we had the box out and a big pile of bits.



Stripping the gearbox revealed that it was the clips in the synchromesh that had failed. I did consider rebuilding the box myself but having never done it before I decided to get a recon unit. I didn't want to get the bus back together to find I hadn't done the gearbox properly.





Re assembly was a fair bit quicker than dismantling. Anyway, it was nice to be able to use the bus again. Total down time was about two months.

Looks good, now to repair old gb , the green bible helps a lot and when it’s broken into 3 or 4 major bits it’s a not easier , no need to worry about front output housing or trannsfer box if those ok