Goggomobil Electronic Gearbox

[Bambyboy]

Hi Folks
Are any of you an expert on the TS400 electronic gearbox .... especially how to test the reverse gear solenoid.  I'm struggling .... despite having a manual! 

It's currently dismantled and on my workbench.  I can get it to 'jump' out of gear but not into gear!

Any advice greatly appreciated!

John

[steven mandell]

Hi Bamby boy, and welcome to the Forum.
Coincidentally I am just now familiarizing myself with similar issues.
My T400 Saloon has the electronic shifter mounted on the dash, but features a longer and nearly fully bent over shifter rod that makes the desired travel up and down adjacent legs of an X pattern seem less intuitive than the shorter straight shifter's more obvious implication.
Does your have this also?
I learned from Uwe that you must first shift into nuetral after engaging first gear to become enabled to select reverse, by pushing up on the vertically orientated and linear motion activated separate shift button.
Also, all gears except for first need to be pre selected before clutch throw to allow engagement.
I.e., pushing in and then letting out the clutch pedal triggers the engagement of the gear preselected except for first gear, and possibly reverse.

Still trying to work the reverse preselect or not part out as I only am able to find nuetral at this point at best maybe one of three tries.  But that's up from one out of ten from a couple of days earlier.
At this point I can't say whether this apparently diminishing difficulty is due to my increasing skill, the car's mechanisms re breaking in, after a hiatus of several decades, or uncertainty of mechanism, as the bent shifter rod is not shown or talked about in the videos that I have seen, and there is presently plenty of slop (be it intended or not) in the mechanism.

Did you take yours apart because you couldn't find reverse, or did you just decide to check it during the course of a rebuild?
If it be the former, please ensure that you were using the proper technique to select it, before trying to fix it, as it may not be broken, and would be better off left alone.
At present for myself, finding nuetral has been the harder prerequisite (after a mandatory just previous engagement of first gear).
But with only a couple dozen shifts under my belt, with a transmission that has been asleep  for decades, I am hopeful of increasing my batting record.

Is your manual in English?

P.S. Where are you, and do you know anyone with any extra sheet metal for my 400?

[steven mandell]

Here is a pic of the inside of the gear  selector switch after I drilled through the long rivets that formed tubes for the screws that hold it to the dashboard, to get it apart.
Missing a piece that Al thinks may have been a grease retaining pad from the broken edge off of the double riveted phenolic tab, but point faces of contacts look clean.
I am hoping that some excess metal shards formed/ accumulated via the process of shifting an ungreased, desert gritty and bent shifter rod in a clockwise fashion rather than a large X pattern may have shorted out my latter attempts to find nuetral.

I will also attempt to braze a drop atop the assymetrically worn shifter born spring loaded plunger that pushes and tilts the 5 contact studded square cast block into and out of contact with the other half of their contact points in the stud and wire containing upper section of the shifter switch..
If that be successful, I will file and polish the spring loaded brass tip back into a more proper dome shape.

Interesting to note that you can actually see both the wear and the circumferential scratches in the thin brass square that surrounds  the central (nuetral) electrode's bore in the studded and wired cap of the switch, that may have accrued through aforementioned clock wise manipulation of the shifter switch handle.

[steven mandell]

And one more picture so as you can become enabled to envision the proper juxtaposition of it's parts.