I dropped the transmission today, and this time it was much faster then last time. Took only about an hour to completely pull the thing and open it up, wow i'm getting good... anyway the prognosis is this. Yup, 2nd gear was toasted alright. The gear on the input shaft was completely stripped clean of all its teeth. Its counterpart gear had big chunks missing out of it. The case of the transmission is fine, I'm surprised I didnt blow a hole in it. It was also fortunate that I didnt drive more then 50 feet after my tranny decided to take a dump and immediately turned off the car, cause there was metal shard all inside the tranny. So let this be a lesson to you, if you ever "loose" a gear and hear alot of noise, IMMEDIATELY pull over and stop, and turn OFF the car. While it might seem OK to drive, you're most likely grinding metal shard thruout the entire transmission. Something NOT to do, especially with a $1500 Quaife diffy in there.

Anyway my options seem to be as follows. Get the car going once again. This is a given whether I keep this car or not. IF I sell the car, I'm putting back in the open differential. If I keep it, the Quaife will obviously stay, but I'm also getting all the gears and bearings and possibly the aluminum case cryo treated.

I looked into prices for new or used transmissions. New thru the dealers will be around $2000 or so, so that's definately out. Used will run $500-600 or so. Still kinda high. So this leaves to actually rebuild the transmission. I am not sure what the prices are, but something tells me they are going to be expensive. This is going to be even more of a pain then doing the differential job, as this job is even more complex.

So now that I gotta dissassemble the shafts and take gears apart, I can alter the gear ratio of each gear (provided I keep the car) rather easily. Does anybody know if another car's gears can be used (say out of a 300z, which is more sport tuned...) or if somebody else can manufacture some custom gears?

Anyway, I'll have some pics up pretty soon of my toasted transmission.

 

good luck with getting that fixed! good job on getting the tranny dropped in an hour!

 

good luck man, keep the car. get some custom gears, be a pioneer for the maxima community. i've never heard of someone changing out the gears. go for it man.

 

Hey Eric, have you considered finding a place that can make you some new gears? Then just have a sequential gear for 1st and 2nd. Should still be pretty streetable with only sequentioal gearing for those two gears. Just an idea I've been toying with once I get my tranny swapped and have a spare tranny laying around.

 

Have you ever thought about cryo-treating the new gears? It's a pretty inexpensive process and hardens the gears by optimizing the grain structure of the metal. I think it'd be on the order of 10-20 bucks to treat one or a couple of gears, but this is just from memory. Check out the following links for more info:
http://www.cryoplus.com/
http://www.onecryo.com/

 

Yup, infact I wrote "If I keep it, the Quaife will obviously stay, but I'm also getting all the gears and bearings and possibly the aluminum case cryo treated."

I got some prices today and second gear alone was $120!!!! Thats just for ONE of the gears, not even the other one. So this is gonna be another few hundred dollar expense... grr..

 

Thats about right just think all of us with the early B13 SE-Rs have 5th gear popout. So we have to get the gear plus the little parts along with it replaced. I too have to get my 5th gear replaced in my se-r , so I feel your pain.