My name´s Óscar, I am from Spain. Last year one of my dreams come true (you must follow your dreams!) and I bought my always loved dream car, a Mitsubishi 3000GT VR4, imported from USA. The car is from 1993 and now, 27 years after, I bought with some things that I must to fix. But always I wanted to be self taught and I have taken this restoration as a personal project, like many other people. Car has lots of problems like: lights don´t pass inspection, aero didn´t work, climate burn out and idle don´t work well, stalling and power loss, dirty interior… all of theses now are fixed. This is the first time that I touch a car, I am not a mechanic, but I am field electronics. So I get started with this great machine, what a start!
I thought that instead of signing up for a car´s mechanic course, I would buy the car, which would cost me the same, and I would manage to learn
Now the car, despite still having little things to fix, drives quite well. But the main problem that I have always had is that I cannot engage second gear if I accelerate a little.
This part is the most difficult for me, because I don’t have a good system to lift the car. I do not have a workshop, nor do I have a suitable place. So if there are tricks to do this job, welcome be.
I’m not afraid to take out the box and open it to repair it, I think you have to be dared and with common sense you can do many things. And if you break something, well you’ve already learned. Although I don’t want to break much because that means money…
Well, I hope I can share experiences and knowledge here. Greetings to everybody and long life to the 3000GT.
Here you have a image of the car. Be careful these days, with the virus issue and forgive my bad english.
I have a 1990 JDM GTO and have recently had the gearbox off twice. It isn’t too difficult if you take your time and remove everything in your way. The tricky part is getting the gearbox back in as it’s like a puzzle. I found the best way is to have the gearbox tilted so the spine is point upwards and lift it straight up like that and once it’s close to going in the gearbox mount side can then be tilted up and then the spline can slide in.
There is a good how-to on the 3si Wiki page for rebuilding a gearbox.
I did the work with the GTO on the driveway. When I lifted the car I had it sitting quite high on the axle stands to create as much space under the car as I could.
I used a big trolley jack to help lift the gearbox into place and had a friend with me helping as well. The gearbox is one big heavy lump but if the jack gets it mostly into position then you just need to quickly slide it into place…if all goes well. If you start to struggle with it then becomes difficult and you’ll need to start again.
I didn’t use a how-to, just made it up as I went. I definitely did not tilt the engine forward, didn’t even consider that.
The gearbox managed to squeeze out so I squeezed it back in but it wasn’t easy. Looking forward to your gearbox removal video to see where I went wrong!
