Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Maintenance & Servicing 2004 Roadster gearbox issue

Just had an equiry from the owner of a 2004 Roadster, so an early one.

My Roadster was manufactured in 04, thus is one of the early ones. I've owned it since 2008 when I bought it from Bill Wykeham in Kensington with about 970 miles on the clock. It now has approx 30,000.

From early days it has had a tendency, after being driven for a while and especially when stopping, parking, reversing a lot, of sticking in gear. Simply depressing and releasing the clutch pedal does not help. One has to switch off the engine, get back into neutral and then restart. As you can imagine, this is tricky if one is on a main road when it happens. Of late the frequency of this happening has increased. I had the last service done at Williams and asked them to look into the problem (previously the car has been largely Techniques serviced but as I live in Dorset I have tired of a 350 mile round trip each time) Their best advice was to change the oil (!) which they did, but to no one's surprise it hasn't helped. I have always thought it might be clutch related?

I had a conversation with another owner recently and he mentioned that it was 'a thing' that the early 3.0s had had this trouble so I thought I would drop you a line in case you can throw any light on it, especially if that light included what MMC had found as a solution, if they ever did so before the 3.7 came along. Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

So I responded by recommending the generic approach to this:

1: Change the fluid.....if no better.......
2. Change the master cylinder......if no better...........
3. Change the slave cylinder, noting that being concentric means an engine out job, so expensive.

However, the owner has been told that this was "a thing" with early Roadsters which I've never come across. Does anybody know any more???

I had a 2004 Roadster and had absolutely no trouble with the gesrbox. In those days I was using the car everday and we toured Europe in it so I did a good few miles in it. The gearbox was a delight.
Nick

I have owned my early 2005 Roadster from new in 2005. It has now done 55,000 miles. I have had no problems with the gearbox or clutch except for a slight leak from the master cylinder.

Just a generic comment. If the clutch control is operating correctly in terms of providing enough travel to release and engage without being on the limit either way then likely the problem will lie with the clutch itself. In any case it would be wise to replace same in its entirety including release bearing whilst replacing slave cylinder.

Replace the master cylinder, they pass fluid between the two internal seals as they start to fail, no external leak evident, but the travel of the piston and amount of fluid pushed to the slave is compromised

If the above doesn't cure it (cheapest thing to try) then it may be the flywheel harmonic balancer thingy in the Dual Mass flywheel (expensive)

Hello Dave,
as I can remember we had several cars we had to take off the engine because of clutch problems.
The problem has been, that they forgot to grease the transmission input shaft the friction plate moves on.
But this mainly did cause a problem to engage gears.
When you check the car and you test if the car wants to roll slightely when you move the gearlever in direction of the first gear -
but first gear not in - this could be the problem...maybe.
This would mean the friction plate always causes a turning input shaft, even when the clutch pedal is fully down, maybe this causes
that you can`t get the gear out? Just an idea....

Regards
Frank Morgan Park Hamburg

Thank you Frank, I will pass this on to the owner!