Hi all,

A while ago I replaced my old and tired gearbox with a reconditioned one I'd put together. All I ended up doing was pulling the clutch/flywheel assembly off, swapping the gearboxes over, and putting everything back together. In particular, I didn't (intentionally) do anything to the engine block. Everything was going well for a few months afterwards, but then every few times I started the engine I'd hear a scraping sound from somewhere around the gearbox area for a second or two (I'm pretty sure it's a metal on metal sound, but it also seems reasonably gentle... kind of like scraping a spoon around the bottom of a milo tin really fast). I didn't think much of it (clever, I know) until one day when it didn't just make the sound when starting, but randomly on and off regardless of whether I was coasting or accelerating or whatever. I did an oil change and nothing particularly nasty came out, so I started it up again and did some experimenting.

I found that the scraping sometimes happened even with the car stopped in gear with the clutch in (revved to about 2000rpm), which suggests to me that the problem must be in either the engine itself or the clutch/flywheel assembly. It also sometimes happened with the clutch all the way out (when driving along in gear that day).

The only other info I can think of that might be important is that I had to tap new threads in the flywheel since the old ones had been stripped, but I didn't get anything rebalanced afterwards.

Does anybody have any idea what the problem might be? Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Harry

EDIT: I should add that I'd never heard the sound before doing the gearbox change.

Probably not a great help to you but using your desciption, the fact its not there with clutch in means it's probably not gearbox and if it wasn't there before, you can count out engine. That leaves clutch/flywheel area. Your milo tin comparison made me laugh but it also made me think it could be 1 or more broken/loose flywheel clutch drive straps (p/n . The broken strap can scrape on housing or just rattle the ends together and as long as there's one atleast holding it, it probably wont rattle badly.

http://www.minispares.com/catalogues/cl ... spx?1~3~29