We follow specialist Stephen A Brear Gearboxes as they dismantle a four-speed manual Jaguar box and discover some problematic damage
WE WEREN’T expecting to witness much of a catastrophe when we were invited to Stephen A Brear Gearboxes in Leeds to watch them stripping down a four-speed manual from a Series I E-type 4.2. The specialist generally only deals with the trade and has been stripping and rebuilding Jaguar gearboxes, both modern and classic, plus a wide assortment of other boxes for over 40 years.
The following steps reveal a few major problems with this particular gearbox, although it takes until Step 17 to find the first one. This concerns the layshaft, which after being extracted has a hard-to-miss worn section that’s broken through the outer casing. Anyone who knows their gearboxes would realise that the layshaft wasn’t too far away from breaking up.
The second major problem we discover concerns the main shaft, which has a serious amount of wear on it. A new main shaft costs around £900, which is perhaps a worthwhile investment for an E-Type, while a cheaper option can be to use metal spray (similar to sleeving), but in our case, there isn’t much metal to work with.
Fortunately, there is some good news, which mainly concerns the gears that don’t appear to be excessively worn and there are no visible oil leaks. This is a potentially complicated job, so our steps aim to provide an overview of how to strip and inspect a Jaguar four-speed manual gearbox, but you can of course delve much further.
