04.22.08
Disassembling Some Sub-Assemblies
A big chunk of today was spent removing the bushings from the inboard ends of the diagonal arms. These were the original rubber bushings and they were a pain to get out. Despite the fact that the rubber bushings are pressed in in two parts and the metal bushings are also installed in two parts, they couldn’t be pounded out with a mallet. The rubber had to be cut out and the metal parts had to be pried out with a vice grip. Eventually, they did come out clean but it took a bunch of time. I’ll be replacing these with urethane bushings.
More time was spent removing the roller and ball bearings from the outboard ends to the diagonal arms. I’m going to replace the bearings, but the spacers all look good. The stub axles were wiped clean and were put in the pile to go to the pressure washer. I also removed the three rubber mounts from the transaxle and discarded them – keeping the mounting hardware. I disassembled the throw-out bearing and clutch fork assembly from the transaxle. I’ll get a rebuild kit for these parts but they didn’t look bad at all.
One thing that did look bad was the nose cone on the transaxle. The very tip of the nose cone snapped off. The part is easy to replace when the transaxle is rebuilt, but it seems to echo the idea that the transaxle is taking a lot of abuse – probably from the motor bouncing up and down. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me though. A VW internal combustion engine certainly weighs more than the G.E. electric motor. The only thing I can think of is that, because the aft battery racks bent the center portion of the sub-chassis (under the aft transaxle mounts) upward, this may have forced the rear of the transaxle up and snapped off the piece of the nose cone. In partial confirmation, I noticed that the shifter rod – the one that runs inside the tunnel – had a nice bow in it. It will need to be replaced and it seems to be providing testimony that the transaxle has been abused by the design of the rear battery mounting system. I’m not only going to need to redesign this portion of the chassis, I amy want to give some consideration to figuring out a way to support the electric motor instead of just hanging it off the transaxle.
