rideabmx

Just fully rebuilt the engine on my 86--my first rebuild. It has been an absolute nightmare mainly because of the machine shop (forgot all the oil galley plugs, oil filter screw, woodruff keys for the crankshaft....and the shop is 2.5 hours away). THANK GOD for this board, there is no way in hell I could have pulled this off without it!!!

At any rate, 3 months in the making I finally drop the engine back in last night and fired it up this morning without a hitch. AWESOME! I finally get everything checked out, super excited for a sunset test drive...get in the truck...and whoa, it ain't moving!!!! All this time I was worried about the thing not running, turns out that isn't all there is to worry about!

I've been on here reading and found all sorts of threads about clutches not disengaging the gear box (gear grinding, difficulty getting into gear, etc.). That's not my problem at all. If I try to shift into reverse without the clutch I obviously grind and when I engage the clutch I can smoothly shift into reverse without any grinding. When I left off the clutch while in reverse I get no movement at all. Or abnormal noise. It's like I'm in neutral. I can then take the shift lever, while not pressing the clutch, and float it through most of the gears without grinding or any other noise..

The problem doesn't appear to be hydraulic since the entire point of the hydraulic clutch system is to disengage the transmission from the engine via the clutch. Clearly that isn't my problem so I haven't bothered troubleshooting it much. What does this leave me with? I have a the FSM for this thing and the Haynes and neither are helpful in this circumstance. Pretty much the only thing I can think of is that I installed the clutch backwards or somehow screwed something up with the pressure plate/clutch disc/flywheel setup at the back of the engine. Would installing the release bearing backwards do anything like this? It seemed backwards when I installed it but that was the way the previous one came out.

I'd like additional opinions before I go through the work of pulling the engine again to flip a silly plate around (I think it would be easier for me to pull the engine, working on plywood over sand with a cherry picker, than it would be to drop the tranny, right? Never dropped a tranny before, but I did just install an engine a few hours ago! Should have left all those labels on...)


The clutch components are new from WabFab (Aisin) and the flywheel was ground. I cleaned everything very well with acetone. The hydraulic system is all stock.

Thanks in advance,
~Josh

vital22re

iTrader: (2)

well the only thing that pops to mind is the the flat side of the disk goes to the fly wheel. And you replaced the pilot bearing, throw out and made sure the throw out bearing was in place on teh fork and the fork was correctly installed. Is the transfer case in neutral? try putting it in 4wd hi and low and see if that does anything.

rideabmx

I fixed it by bleeding the clutch hydraulic system.