Found this in the reversing gear....

[anthony.kelhower]

Hello friends,

As I was taking the lovely and magical A4 apart to start a rebuild I found this curious hunk of metal sitting in the housing of the reversing gear. I can't seem to find what it came off of or where it came from.

The reversing gear functioned mostly OK before i started the rebuild project. It was slipping out of gear at high RPM, which i fixed by not adjusting it, but simply just holding the shifting lever down with my foot.

Any ideas where it may have come from or what it is? I'm wondering if it somehow was a old piece of a previous fix on the engine or ... if i'm in trouble.

Thanks...

[Don Moyer]

Very interesting! I love identifying pieces of engine, but nothing really jumps out at me about this piece. If others have a problem as well, we may need a couple more photos. I can't really tell if the piece is broken (with fracture surfaces) or if this is the original shape. It does look pretty symmetrical.

By the way, this is a good place to remind all to never, ever hold a shifting lever in forward. This places considerable side load on the ball bearing in the operating cone, which is on the short list of critical parts that we don't ever want to run out of.

Don

[Administrator]

Maybe you could use the inside and outside arcs of the piece to estimate diameters (if it really is a piece of something)?

The attached template is supposed to show concentric circles in quarter-inch increments of diameter, from 4" to 6". Try matching your piece, recognizing that the arcs of adjacent circles are hard to distinguish from one another. You might be able to only get as far as saying "It's a piece of something between 4 and 5 inches in diameter."

HTH.

Bill

[Dave Neptune]

Looks like it could be a piece of the an oil "dam" edge near a "sling ring", perhaps from the front seal-less area of the open crank end. Or it could be a shoulder of a retainer for a seal or bearing seat that has broken away. I'm not real familiar with the inside configuration of the A-4, but that is what the "piece" looks like to me.

Dave Neptune

[sastanley]

notice the shiny portion on the inside arc of the piece...indicating it may have been riding on some other piece at one point.

[hanleyclifford]

Have a look at 285976, brace. It might be just hanging on. Another candidate, 261034, spacer.

[anthony.kelhower]

Thanks for the reply.

Did i mention i was leaking oil at about 1qt an hour? That was a pretty fun feature of the engine. Nothing like having to spend more money on oil and oil pads then on gas and beer.

I'm going to have to go check the engine some more and see if i can can find it...

[hanleyclifford]

If you are pushing/holding that shift lever forward you are driving the "throwout" bearing aft. Check all parts that are on the business end of that motion. Your rear seal could be leaking. Send more pix.

[Don Moyer]

You might check the pressure plate of your forward clutch assembly (see product No. - OREV_20_255 in our online catalog), and the support plate for the rear main thrust bearing. While these two parts are in the same neighborhood in which your piece showed up, and they both have curves, I can't clearly see the shape of your piece in either of them, but again, another photo of the piece might show that it does.

Don

[Newenglandah]

Hello anthony I'd recommend checking on the inside of the rear flange. Someone could have torqued it improperly and broke that piece off, are you leaking oil out the rear flange? I checked on my motor and you really can't see it from the reversing gear inspection cover, I would pull off the reversing gear housing from the back side of the motor to get a good look at it.