Finn
A good friend of mine down under (John Merton) , who is a lurker on this forum, asked me to post this on his behalf here , I hope it helps you.
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I noticed on Talk Morgan that someone had raised the issue of difficulties in his ‘73 Plus 8 in selecting first and reverse gear from rest.
This was also raised on “The Morgan Experience, possibly by the same person( I don’t subscribe to it either). I sent something to Duncan Charlton on it which he posted.
But mainly to help others the most common cause of this problem is the engine idling too fast. Mine’s fine around 800 rpm but over 1,000rpm it starts to play up and becomes more difficult as the revs rise further. I suspect the spigot bush( which I think is oilite starts to pick up a bit and when the clutch then starts spinning it adds centrifugal force.
Another issue. Despite all the service data recommendations, NEVER use engine all in this gearbox. When I first got my Plus 8 23 years ago I wondered about the advisability of this in a helical gearbox of this nature with this power potentially driving it. I searched high and low through the Castrol data ( hard to find relevant data on it even in 1990) but eventually found their recommendation was for VMX80. This makes a lot more sense given it’s a gearbox oil designed for this type of application.
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