T4 gear shift linkage repair.

[jets]

I stopped on my way home to see my son & family & when I selected reverse & started to engage the clutch it kept going forward. A look under the bonnet revealed a broken ball support bush, the inner part was still in place in the mounting bracket but the rest had broken away & disappeared. This is a common problem on T4s with manual trans. & prone to breaking sometime in its life. My son had some cable ties that was OK for a temp. repair & the van drove perfectly on the way home.
Seano had the same experience 5 years ago & did a very good write-up on his repair method.

http://www.vwwatercooled.com/forums/f136/i-accidentally-disabled-gear-stick-t4-82457-2.html#post927499

After reading his, watching youtube & reading others on the T4 Forum, I was inspired by one on the T4 Forum [joao from Portugal] that made a clamp arrangement to push the Gate rod [as VW call it] into the cup bush.
By using the tool it eliminates the need to disconnect the shift rod underneath & the subsequent fiddling with adjustment to engage all the gears properly.
The hardest part for me was undoing the 3 socket head cap screws holding the mounting bracket in place.
There is very little room in there & the middle screw needs the reversing switch to be removed. The rear most screw was the hardest because the shift tower on the gearbox is high enough to stop a standard Allen key from entering the head of the screw. A ball end type is needed but while I was trying to undo it, it slipped & damaged the hex. in the head.
My son was called on to help out because he has more strength than I do. I had cut down the 6mm key to the ideal length.
I slid a 6mm ring spanner next to the head with a 1/4 drive 6mm socket & sliding T bar on the end. A coolant hose was between the two. The tightening torque of the screws is 20Nm but never the less hard to undo.





After removing the mounting bracket it was straight forward to press in the new bush using some detergent in the hole & outside of the bush.
The mounting of the bracket was a fiddle & time consuming & using the tool I had made was straight forward.




This is the tool I made shown with the new cup bush already pressed into the mounting bracket. After the bracket is fixed in place,
the gate rod is positioned with the ball against cup. I lubed the bush & ball with some rubber grease & tightened up the screws using a 17mm ratchet ring spanner. It's amazing how easy it went together without much force.



By installing shorter screws, say 50mm long, this tool should be able to press the bush into the bracket without the need to remove the nasty screws. The recess in the plate holds the bush in place.

[jets]

This image shows the location hole for the gate rod to hold it in position. This tool should also work for pressing on the balls.
In my case, both balls were in near new condition & weren't replaced. The VW Spares man said that they sell a lot more of the cup bush than the balls.

[Sunny43.5]

I vaguely remember working with the same selector on my sons T4 some years back , I do remember the difficulty in refitting and I think from memory I used some sort of home modified hand clamp to pop them back into place . Yours looks like a good bit of kit .

[jets]

I used some sort of home modified hand clamp to pop them back into place .

When I first looked at the problem & trying to shortcut removing the entire linkage, I looked at using a G clamp. The smallest would be a 6 inch & that was far too long when opened. That's how I came up with this design.