Alfa Romeo Forums banner

Lemons/Chump problems

91K views 378 replies 34 participants last post by  archeologist 
#1 ·
Since we've been running a transaxle car the longest in Lemons I've decided to start a thread for all the Lemons/Chump racers for all the problems we've encountered while racing these cars. We seem to run into a whole different set of problem because of how long our races are. At the last T'Hill we were out for about an hour and a half changing a broken transaxle and still manages to do 988 miles of racing. No wonder stuff breaks.

I'm hoping others will post their experience with breakage so hopefully we can all learn from each other and not all have the same problems. One of these days an Alfa is going to take an overall win.

The late two races we've broken the finger that is on the shift shaft that the shift linkage bolts to. The first time we broke the tip of the finger off and the last race we broke the finger where the roll pin goes through. On one side the finger is relieved for the u bracket that holds the spring that centers the shaft in the 3-4 shift rail and the finger was VERY thin there.
 
#103 ·
Hi All,

I just inspected the driveshaft on my 24 Hours of LeMons Milano and the Center Giubo is showing some tears in it. The tears do not extend to the ID or OD but are crescent shaped and are new(ish)

This Giubo is one of the original ones that is labeled "JURID" and as far as I know was out of production a long time ago. Inventories of this part were running out last year or earlier.

This particular Giubo was installed 76 hours of racing earlier and has been in the car a little over a year.

The driveline in this car has never failed, nothing has ever broken despite the relentless punishment it takes but I have felt the driveshaft banging around on high RPM downshifting before turn in for the last two races.

An Alfa Supplier who's opinion I respect had told me a while back that a batch of new replacement center Guibo's made in Germany had been released and that they were failing at a high rate in street cars. Does anyone have any experience with the new Giubo's? Or offer any advice on alternatives?

This is a LeMons car so I not going to fabricate carbon a fiber one piece or any crazy alternatives. Is it possible to use the Alfetta center Giubo in these cars? (thicker at 1.5" versus 1") Any way to adapt the Mercedes flex disc?

I also have no time to fix this as I will be racing the car at Summit Point the weekend after next (July 14th- 16th)


Greg
 
#104 ·
Center flex disc

Hi All,
An Alfa Supplier who's opinion I respect had told me a while back that a batch of new replacement center Guibo's made in Germany had been released and that they were failing at a high rate in street cars. Does anyone have any experience with the new Giubo's? Or offer any advice on alternatives?
Greg
Greg,

We have changed to a BMW giubo for the center. It is 4mm thicker but all you have to do is machine the rear flange on the front drive shaft where it slides on the splines. The new giubos are only $50 or so and we haven't had any problems with them.
See the thread below.

http://www.alfabb.com/bb/forums/alfetta-gtv6-1972-1986/193582-1985-gtv6-driveshaft.html

Hope this helps.
 
#105 ·
Driveshaft

Well, I made an interesting discovery today. I picked up the rebuilt, rebalanced driveshaft with new giubos and attempted to put it all together. And failed. I had the same symptom of the shaft assembly appearing to be too short, IE the rear giubo would have to be stretched to seat on the trans yoke. I fussed and fidgeted and contemplated my navel. I finally pulled it all back apart and realized that the flywheel shaft was not seating in the centering bush on the giubo. I immediately accused the shaft of being mushroomed by a P/O, not so. My calipers showed that the centering bush was .02mm smaller in diameter than the shaft. A little precision machine work on the giubo and viola, it pushed on with a good push by hand. The giubo in question is a Malo Akron # 593006AGES and it states right on the box that it is for the Alfetta. It was obtained from one of the big two Alfa parts specialists. I guess the moral of the story is "trust but verify".
 
#106 ·
Are you using the correct center Giubo? The Alfetta had a very wide one I believe. This would change the overall length of the driveshaft. I had heard that they were NLA.

Greg
 
#108 ·
I Autoxed the car last week and almost everything worked fine. We had some trouble with 3rd gear synchro. I pulled the gearbox last nite and looked at the guts- not good. All of the synchro teeth are worn with 3rd gear's teeth being mostly worn away. I've 2 spare transaxles so I have a stock pile to work with. Other than new synchro rings, what else should I consider replacing? Additionaly is it wise to swap a complete gearset from one transaxle to another (Alfetta)?
 
#110 ·
I am struggling with gearbox / transaxle condition all the time. It is mostly about training your drivers to give the Alfa pause while upshifting and double clutching the downshifts. Its not always necessary to double clutch the downshifts but going down into 2nd at race speeds seems to be a time when you need to double clutch.

Having a passenger seat in my car for the practice / testing day has let me observe my drivers and give them pointers on shifting.

Redline 75-90 NS gear oil is the only lube I will use in the transaxle.

When I am drag racing another car (like the Porsche 928 at Summit Point!) It is torture that I am pulling him down and then he gets away while I do my slow upshift but that's the smart thing to do in the long run. I spent to many laps behind the Porsche looking for a safe way around him. He had a bit more grunt but I was much faster through the corners and at the exits. I pushed him to drive harder to stay in front and he wound up blowing his motor after about 9 laps.

I am running a stock clutch disc because it is very forgiving to the driveline but a lighter disc would help out the synchronization I bet.

Freshening up a transaxle is a big job but totally do able. It has been covered in the BB and elsewhere. You do not want to mix pinion shafts and ring gears around. But gears are not a problem. Gears themselves almost never go bad though it is all the rest that is a problem.

Heat in the transaxle is the big problem when you start really pushing the car harder and harder in endurance racing.

All you need to do is to freshen up syncro bands, sliders and the dogs. The dog rings are the things that really get hammered from racing these boxes. Generally it is only on 2nd and 3rd where the problem is. Get a good work surface with lots of space. Take a lot of pictures, work methodically laying out parts in the order they come apart and you will need a few tools.

If you don't want to take it on Richard Jemison is very good with the transaxles.

Greg
 
#109 ·
Chump problem

Hey guys, I am completely done with Chumpcar, not sure if any of you have heard but there was a major problem at Charlotte.

First of all the race was supposed to be 14 hours...then after the required deposit was paid, they shortened it to 10 hours with an option of doing 4 45 min sprint races after the enduro. I was not interested in doing the sprints as my drivers are all "vintage" plus I like to have some time after an enduro to really look over the car.

Anyway, I towed the car to Charlotte the day before the event, waited 3.5 hours in a tech line even though I brought a car that had SCCA, NASA, BMW/CCA and SVRA logbooks only to be told at the 6pm drivers meeting that the 10 hour race scheduled to start at 8am would not start until 8pm. The story John gave us is that the track double booked the the weekend. We were not interested in racing until 2 or 3 in the morning with a car that had no lights, not to mention I had to work at VIR that morning....really we had no choice but to ask for our money back and eat all the expenses. John offered a consolation of a free race at Charlotte later in the year but after my experiences with CHUMPCAR this year, I dont think I ever want to run with them again.

I was really happy with CHumpcar when I was running with them a couple of years ago, but things have changed and not for the better.

On a brighter note, I will be running my orange Chump/Lemon Milano in the Grassroots Motorsport Ultimate track car challenge in a couple of weeks at VIR.


Al Taylor
 
#111 ·
Thanks Greg- my mentor has preached to us the importance of the double clutch and we are trying to practice what he preaches. We found 3rd gear dogs to be our problem with some wear on first and second. The guts came out VERY clean with no residue or sign of overheating. I belive someone prior to my ownership had been inside. I've got 2 spare tranaxles in my garage and should be able to round up all the parts I need. Do you recommend replacing the input and mainshaft bearings while I'm in there?. If so who do you source them from?
 
#112 ·
Thanks Greg- my mentor has preached to us the importance of the double clutch and we are trying to practice what he preaches. Do you recommend replacing the input and mainshaft bearings while I'm in there?. If so who do you source them from?
The few transaxles I have opened and messed with always had bearings that were fine. So I reassembled with the original. I am pretty sure they are either proprietary or difficult to source new. The half shaft seals and bearings on the other hand are common.

I have done a modification on my transaxles based on a problem both I and Brian Shorey experienced with our transaxles. The case gets so hot that the pressed in shaft for the reverse gear gets loose and rotates so that it rubs on the fifth gear. It makes the transaxle make a zinging sound. I now pin that shaft in place, but this problem happened to me only twice and both times at Stafford Springs raceway. At the Stafford Bullring we pretty much did the whole race in 2nd gear at 7000 RPM at a slow speed so there wasn't much to dissipate the heat.

I think I talked about it here. http://www.alfabb.com/bb/forums/milano-75-1985-1993/153774-gearbox-clutch-noise.html#post773997

If it never happened to you than I would not sweat it.

Greg
 
#113 ·
More Transaxle woes

The Team ran our car at Buttonwillow the last weekend in June. To say it was hot would be an understatement. 107 to 109 temps with track temps around
140. Saturday went good and the car was fast.



Sunday things went down hill. The biggest problem was the tranny would pop out of gear on decel. All gears, all the time.

We took the box out and apart tonight and I don't see anything wrong with it. Even when it was popping out of gear it shifted fine.
I'm looking for any ideas or suggestions as to what may be wrong.
 
#115 ·
What he said...

I'm out of my depth here, but I would check the input shaft in the transaxle for axial movement. Perhaps it get loaded a different way in decel and moves enough axially to pull a dog ring / syncro slider out of engagement?

After all the gears are helical in the transmission and will impart side loadings under load.

Although if what I said were true you would think that it would pop out of only one set of gears like 1st and 3rd or 2nd and 4th. because they engage in the same direction.

Total kludge fix would be to shim the detent springs tighter on the shifting rod / forks.

Brian's right though. Are you restraining the front transaxle mounts as well?

RJ has a lot of experience with these transaxles, you might want to drop him a line. Love him or hate him he has seen more problems with them than any of us.

But my standard reply to my guys when they talk about something going wrong with something that usually works fine is always "What Changed?"

Your car sounds and looks awesome in the video. You have some big speed differential with the cars you are passing. A little scary actually because some of them probably don't see you coming.

Greg
 
#116 ·
I'm not a transaxle guy, but I would certainly agree that the problem is likely outside the box. Just how fast is that car?:thumbup: I can't believe the speed differential. Better be careful about that claiming rule. Great driving, slicing through all those rolling chicanes.
 
#117 ·
Hi Wes,
I watched more of the video and I saw something there that I think could be an issue with a transaxle. The curbs.

A few times in the video your driver gets a good piece of a curb while he is on the power. You can hear the motor go up then as the wheel looses contact with the road, then you hear it landing

With that much power I think that the shock loading going into the transaxle is too much. I think it will damage the ring and pinion or other parts eventually.

Greg
 
#118 · (Edited)
Shifting issues

If you are using the isostatic linkage any movement between the chassis and transmission will cause such issues.

The front mounts have to be through bolted.

A real solution is to eliminate the obfuscation of the factory shift mechanisms, particularly the isostatic mess.

A direct shifter with the shift rod ran on the drivers side of the tunnel through a hole in the body (directly in front of the shift rod) eliminates vagarity and makes shifts positive and direct with no front or rear movements unless driver supplied.
I built these and several are out there in racerland. I lost most pics but if I can find one I`ll post.
Maybe Jes or Al Mitchell can send pics of their`s?

The pic below is the shifter in the GTR. The shifter itself if a stock piece but as you can see the tube goes directly to the shift rod at the clutch cover.
The others built to fit in stock chassis had the shift rod through a pivot made from a spherical bearing attached to the side of the tunnel cover.
 

Attachments

#119 ·
Road America report

We managed to return home from this weekends Chump race with a mostly unbroken car. We managed to finish 42 of 86 making the start. We were sidelined for the last 2 hours or so of Saturdays race with a trans that refused to shift. We were able to swap in the spare before the dark and rain set in. Sunday brought a cool foggy start and a lean running Spica pump. Shortly after that the alternator quit, but the Optima was up to the challenge. Post race diagnosis found the Baro compensator spring had failed. By our standards, a very successful race!
 
#120 ·
Hot Transaxle

We were sidelined for the last 2 hours or so of Saturdays race with a trans that refused to shift.
Was this after a pit stop? We had the same thing happen to us. The transaxle case gets so hot the it seizes the shift shafts. As soon as it cools down it will shift fine. The tranny can get to over 300 degrees F according to Greg and I know it was so hot that when we drained the fluid that it melted the plastic drain pan.
Check out the following post.
 
#121 ·
Cool Transaxle

This is the follow up to my post about jumping out of gear at Buttonwillow. So we didn't find anything that we thought was causing the jumping out of gear problem so we put the transaxle back together and went to the race at Thunderhill at the end of September. Tested the car on Friday and no big surprise the tranny was still jumping out of gear. We swapped in the spare transaxle and started the race. And made TWO laps and blew up the pinion gear. I guess an Alfetta box really can't take a 24V motor. Ended up towing the 34 car 120 miles home and grabbing the 35 car which has been sitting since running three days at Sears Point. Got the car thru tech right has the day ended. The 35 car made it about two hours and then ate it's front wheel bearings. DUH, we should have repacked them after we got the car thru tech but nobody thought of it. Our worst finish in Lemons ever. Oh well.
We pulled apart the transaxle that was jumping out of gear and looked at everything. Now we've always had a problem of the tranny getting hot and having the bushings the gears ride being black but we decided that maybe we should look at them VERY closely. Turns out the .020-.030 clearance may be a little too much. Since the bushings themselves are NLA we went on a transaxle buying spree. We bought three Alfetta boxes out of LA and I pulled two Milano boxes out of Pick-N-Pull. One turned out to be Platinum LSD box. Bonus.
The Alfetta boxes were just for parts. We made a fixture for checking the clearance on the bushing and for pushing the bushings out of the Alfetta gears and pressing them back into the gears that we use. As I've posted this is our home made close ratio box so we want to keep the same gears. We also drilled the pinion shaft so that we could lubricate the bushings with pressurized oil. We reassembled the transaxle and installed it in the car and plumbed our oil cooler set up and this is what we have now. Driving the car around the parking lot it shifts great and does not jump out of gear. We didn't make the test last weekend because we were still getting the new front brakes straightened out. Brakes are good now and the car is pretty much ready to go. I'll report back after next weekend.
 

Attachments

#125 ·
Transaxle temp

We also drilled the pinion shaft so that we could lubricate the bushings with pressurized oil.
How was this done? I know of no way that the pinion shaft can be drilled to oil the bushings.

The gears can be drilled between the teeth in 3 or 4 points on each gear, to lube the bushings and pinion shaft and that isn`t difficult if you have enough carbide bits to do the work.

Commonly most temp problems are driver induced. I have suggested that the brake light switch be adjusted for sensitivity to any weight/pressure on the brake petal, and a red light connected to the system to keep dull drivers from resting their left foot on the brake petal as some "left foot brake" which causes major heat in the trans. As well stock Milano/Alfetta brakes are an absolute no use item for a race car.

Alfetta gearboxes are only good for donor gearsets as they are extremely weak and fragile.

Winglets welded to the deDion tube are good to force air up and around the transaxle and brakes. Ducts without blowers in them are a waste of effort. As well for them to be effective they need to be fitted to shrouding to blow into the center of the brake rotor from the back side (trans side).
 
#126 ·
Drilling the pinion shaft

How was this done? I know of no way that the pinion shaft can be drilled to oil the bushings.
We drilled the pinion shaft lengthwise to get the oil in the shaft and then radially to get the oil out to the bushings. We plugged the pinion end and then plumbed the oil cooler return into the speedo sender opening on the side of the case. Since the speedo is driven off the other end of the pinion shaft we know have oil being pressure fed into the end of the pinion and out to the bushings. I'm sure we're getting some leakage at the front bushing but what ever oil we're getting down the shaft is better than before.
 
#128 ·
I was telling a friend in the race business about this and he said "wait a minute" and then came back with one of the shafts from a hewland transaxle / gearbox. It had the same type of gundrilled center and oil holes distributing oil down it.

The transmission had a internal gear pump.

One thing I noticed about the shaft as I looked at it was that the holes that were drilled to distribute the oil into the gears bushings were sized progressively larger as they moved away from the source of the oil. I guess the designers had tested the output at each gear and come up with the sizing.

Greg
 
#129 ·
So, how did the Alfa contingent do at "Arse freeze a Palooza" at Sonoma raceway? AKA Sears point.

All the LeMons groupies are dying for the news...

Greg
 
#132 · (Edited)
Wish I had thought to look for a thread like this before our first race in a Milano! We had a hell of a time this past weekend, but were grateful for the help from Wes and Brian and their teammates. We got to experience a seemingly unsolvable starts-then-dies condition which hadn't affected the car in a year-and-a-half of street driving (including SF to Sacto and back to get the cage installed). After swapping just about every component except the engine, we traced the fault to a bad ground from the air meter. Once on track, we experienced incredible brake fade and so much pitch and roll that we got nearly seasick!

Anyway, a great weekend, and now that we've gotten it on track, we can start turning it into a race car.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/telstar/13374005475/in/photostream/player/

(Can't imbed the photo with a Flickr link...)
 
#135 ·
Windy City Grand Prix Chump Report

We just returned from Autobahn CC and hands down our best weekend yet! We had a top 20 finish sewn up both days but......
A mathematical error by the the team captain (yeah, me) put our total competition value at $505 earning us a penalty lap. We ended up at P24 on Saturday, without the penalty we would have been P18. We ran Saturday's race on Kumho street tires so our first time driver would get some warning before he got to the edge.

Sunday we switched to the Star Specs and dropped our lap times by as much as seven seconds! We were running as high as P15 and moving up when the crank pulley and the lower radiator hose started arguing. The pulley won. We had to sit out for 90 minutes while parts were rounded up (my fault for not having a spare) and for the 2 trains to clear the crossing so our runner could get back to the track. We got back on course with an hour and a half left and finished strong. We ended the day at P30.

The only problem we encountered was the coolant leak. Our 2.0l pulled hard for three days straight, the Spica pump was flawless (we ran to 6k rpm and saw the AFR run from 11.7 to 12.5 WOT), we had zero defects in the transaxle, every shift was flawless. I think my drivers are finally developing the Alfa touch! Handling was consistently neutral with a touch of driver ineducable oversteer. Over the course of the off season we modified the DeDion tube to give us a couple of degrees of negative camber and moved the center pivot for the Watts link to the bottom of the tube. With these two mods we have pretty much eliminated inside wheel spin in the corners.
 
Top