87 5kCS tranny stuck, won't come out

[patrick gillen]

Closure and Lessons Learned:

I put away the 2 ft 2x2 fir and got out the 2 ft heavy metal crow bars; another hour later I was able to birth the tranny.
What I found:
-	Pressure plate and flywheel, as flat and as I’ve ever seen and finishing marks still evident.
-	Disc: Sach name etc looks factory fresh; as good as I’ve ever seen over numerous clutch R/R’s from cornbinder's through numerous fords and two audi 5 spds.
-	The pilot bearing: cooked. ½ of the needles were found inside the clutch and flywheel (probably came out during removal), the other half are flattened and frozen/welded into the pilot bearing raceway. 
-	Trans input shaft: galled, not shiny as seen in the past on other clutch R/R’s. Need to micrometer this if I can find the spec on what it should be. 
-	Unknown who last serviced the clutch. Car was bought used and has been in family many years with many hiway miles.
So, it is very likely the trans input shaft was seized to the crankshaft via the pilot bearing, preventing shifts. What is puzzling though is how this suddenly failed without warning, unless the noise was masked by the loud exhaust while my son was driving.

Repair 101: if you’re goin all the way, replace the pilot bearing. Whoever did the last clutch job scrimped on a $14 pilot bearing or forgot to grease it, causing me and you too many manhours of grief.

Wish list: who came up with let’s bury the linkage at the top of the tranny so no one can see there are three pivot points for two shift rods.  It is very impressive of our comrades that all 6 shifts can happen via one shaft into the trans but Bentley and Haines need to elaborate a little more here.  Are the 100’s like this? I remember cursing the short link on my ‘79 5000 after it failed in eastern Washington yrs ago. I had to crawl under it and manually put it into 5th gear so I could drive it back to Portland. And then replacing the link with everything in place, what a PITA.

The "new" list method using email is much easier, thanks all for the tips that it is based on email.

Case is now closed, thanks to you all for your encouragement and suggestions.

Pat

-----Original Message-----
From: Huw Powell [mailto:audi at humanspeakers.com] 
Sent: August 07, 2014 7:27 AM
To: Pat Gillen
Cc: quattro at audifans com
Subject: Re: 87 5kCS tranny stuck, won't come out

Daylight is good.

Things might just be binding now, between potentially damaged parts as mentioned and simply the weight of the tranny hanging on the engine.

I do seem to recall wrestling at least one off with great effort.

On the small bodied quattros, at least, the front of the engine needed to be raised to tilt the whole mess down at the rear to clear the firewall (or junk mounted to it), while supporting the weight of the tranny with a floor jack, and using 2 or 3 pry bars to gradually work it off.

If you are nervous about scarring up the castings substitute wooden wedges for pry bars?  Then pound on them in rotation.

On 8/6/2014 9:36 PM, Pat Gillen wrote:
> After another several hours of lookin, no bolts were left in. I did 
> take engine bracket to bell housing off as suggested, now I got a 
> place to pry. After an hour of prying I can see  fraction of mm 
> daylight all around the parting line.