4-5 February 2017My tranny was making some awful noises on the shakedown drives, so we had to sort that out before the tune. We first thought was due to the driveshaft hitting the crossmember, since we didn't swap out to the STI one originally. Did that and then found the downpipe hitting the STI crossmember, so our welder had to re-fit the lower portion. Still no luck.... So a couple weekends ago, Ryan pulled the center differential out of my 6 speed to replace all the bearings. We've come across the center diff howl in one of my other FXTs but never with a 6MT.. Guess they're not 100% bulletproof
Crossmember, downpipe and driveshaft out, shifter and reverse lockout cable disassembled (for the second time in <2 months!):
Something you don't see every day (hopefully). Look at that expensive blue lifeblood...
Center differential gears and bearing(s), with the DCCD in the background. Disassembled and removed the journal bearing that was likely causing the noise. I think the yellow plastic thing in the housing is a sensor for reverse gear (which wasn't reliably turning on the reverse lights):
See the pitting around the races inside? Click to zoom in, pretty crazy!
Cleaned up the rest; there was some scoring on that bearing in the foreground. Press-fit the two new bearings on that other gear thing.
This is everything re-assembled into the transmission, before replacing the housing. Which caused a lot of cursing to get each gear/bearing to line up properly...
Seems successful now! We drove it and didn't get the bad vibrations in 5th and 6th gears; in fact I couldn't hear anything over the exhaust... as you'd hope for a transmission, right!
Next day I installed my custom
Ortiz cluster surround for the
Innovate ECB-1 4-way and
Aquamist HFS-3 gauges!
Innovate seriously needs to consider a quick disconnect at the gauge itself, because I spent ages pulling all my neatly tucked wires back from the center console, through the pod, and tucking again. Argh! Aquamist was a single ethernet-looking cable that plugged into the back of the gauge.
Overall, I like it. The finish is matte painted which could get damaged easily, and should NOT have yellow microfiber towels (or paper towels) used on it... Heh. The Innovate doesn't push-fit very well; I need to add some tape to get it pushed in fully, once all the tuning is done. Also have a silver bezel for it, so both gauges will match!
(haven't got the JDM cluster odometer-matched yet)