Gearbox oil change

From THE Corrado Forum Knowledge Base

You will need the following

• 2x quarts (bottles) of Redline MT90 for £33 delivered from Demon Tweeks
• 17mm Allen key
• Funnel and pipe £2 from B&Q

A day or two before you intend to change the oil, spray some WD40 (or even better PlusGas!) on the gearbox bolts (see Fig.1 below for location). This will help loosen them up.

Before you start to drain and refill the oil take your car out for a run, about 10-15 miles should be ok. This will help mix up all the bits of crud inside the box and make the oil warmer and thus thinner for draining.

Ensure you’re on level ground before starting. You will need to gauge how much oil to put in by filling it to the bottom of the refill hole. Therefore if you are on a hill you’re danger of putting too much or too little in.

Both bolts will require a 17mm allen-key (see Fig.2). You can buy an allen socket from Halfords for about £5. Alternatively, you could use a bloody massive allen-key that looks like a crowbar.

UNDO THE REFILL BOLT FIRST. (You don’t want to find you’ve drained the box and are unable to refill it.) Once that’s done you can undo the drain bolt.

Slide some form of collection tray beneath the gearbox to collect the old oil. I used an old paint-roller tray, which is nice and thin and holds just the right amount of drained oil. (You’ll probably get just over 1½ litres out. It smells like peanuts, and probably makes a good Satay sauce.)

Let all the old oil drain out for 5-10 mins, and remember to put the drain plug back in before refilling, else you’ll feel stupid.

The best method for filling the box is to use a length of plastic tubing and a funnel (see Fig.3 below). You’ll have trouble filling the box from beneath with just the bottles because there’s very little room. Both the funnel and tubing cost me about £2 from B&Q.

Run the tubing down through the engine bay and into the refill hole. Then pour the new oil down the funnel. You will want to fill the box up to the point at which the oil is level with the bottom of the refill hole.

Remove the funnel, screw the refill bolt back in, and you’re done! Dispose of the old oil in an environmentally safe way to earn extra brownie points.

This should improve your gear change, but if you are still having problems, one simple thing overlooked with the gearshift cables is grease! On all the 02As I've tried, a notchy change has generally been cured by greasing the linkages, especially the selector mechanism under the counter weight. Use lots of good old fashioned Castrol CL grease. Fancy white greases and chain waxes are not man enough.

A bit of grease on the mech under the gear gaiter helps too, and of course adjustment, which can be done by adjusting the cables at the selector end on the gearbox. There is also a VW tool to align the gearstick mech properly.