Legacy: What I Broke

[Mr. Pockets]

In my locker are photos of what I broke on the Legacy's transmission. The parking pawl's return spring was chewed into little pieces which were resting in the pan.

That, and one of hte reduction gears chipped a tooth.

I have another reduction gear, from my old SVX tranny. We compared and found that both sets (Legacy and SVX) are 1:1.

But is it worth pulling the chipped one and replacing it? It's really just a corner of a tooth. Am I likely to damage anything else by replacing the gear? The gear and shaft seem to come out of the tranny easily enough, but maybe I hurt something by pulling it.

Or maybe I'm just gun-shy after finding out that I didn't put it back together correctly the first time...

Any opinions?

Anybody besides Doug?

PS I'm really sorry about the multiple threads for the same topic. But sometimes I feel like some questions are lost amongst others and I wanted this one about the chipped gear answered specifically. Thanks.

[Mr. Pockets]

Okay, so I spent Wednesday and Thursday nights putting the Legacy back together. I took a lot of time and made sure everything was done right.

I had to keep adding ATF, but eventually everything settled down and now it seems normal. The only weird symptom is that, when slowing down for a stop, the speedo goes a little weird below 20mph. It actually hits about 15-10mph, jumps back up to 20 or so, and then goes back down. No codes yet, but it sounds like speed sensor #2 is going bad.

And there's kind of a rattling sound while coasting. I don't know if it made that noise before, or if some bits of broken spring ended up where they shouldn't, or what. It sounds sort of like a muffled card-in-bicycle-spokes thing - frequency depends on speed.

[Mr. Pockets]

It's been a week and the car's running fine. No slipping any more and it stays where we put it.

The axle definitely needs to be replaced, though, and I may be able to get to it after the one-day autocross tomorrow.

Anyway, so I seem to have gotten away with the damage I caused and the subsequent re-repairs I had to do.