Morning,

Thanks for the info guys, seems I was a little off the mark with pricing. I plan on hanging onto it for a while though so it's money well spent I guess.

Cheers for the heads up on the bearings too I'll keep that in mind. I was thinking of taking it down to topgear to get it rebuilt, I've heard good thinks about his business. Chris

Could'nt agree more,my local bearing service in Southport always supply SKF or NSK,the point is by purchasing outside a dealership you are not paying the 200% mark up applied by factory dealers.In most cases you will be matching product removed from your gearbox with the exact same item,originally sourced from the same jap manufacturer but in a differant box,it really does help having family in the spares(dealer)business for the last 16 years

There are bearings, and there are bearings. Never buy standard off the shelf bearings for a performance gearbox. If you go for anything less than good Japanese bearings like Nachi then you may as well fit dirt for oil. Go SKF if you can afford it. The bearings make the difference every time.

I'm with Revhead Chris,just short of a grand,those bloody syncros are made of gold.You can save a $ by taking your bearings to some one like Bearing Services so the size can be identified and matched usually half the cost that you would pay for genuine Nissan.

7-800 sounds about right (possibly up to a grand depending on labour). Some time back (actually nearly 20 years) I was looking at getting a box reco'd for a mini. There was one place charging approx a couple of hundred. Another place charged around double that, and there was a third place who wouldn't give a firm quote until they saw the condition of the current one - strictly price on application. I ended up doing mini boxes myself (and did a few for friends and stuff). The interesting thing was that even at trade price, i couldn't even source the parts for the total price the first place were quoting (and a lot wears out on mini boxes, you need to replace a hell of a lot of stuff each time as a minimum, and beyond that hte price can go up a hundred or two more depending upon the rest of the bits condition), Anyway - if you can't get the parts alone (at trade price) cheaper than a place is charging for a full reco, there's no way around it, they simply must be taking shortcuts, and not replacing everything.

I could tell the 'longer' version of this story, but the bottom line is you often get what you pay for with gearboxes.Some of the dearer places might still be dodgy, but you can bet your life that if the cost is too good to be true, then that's precisely what you're going to get stuck with.

It's probably also worth telling the reconditioner what the intended use of the gearbox is. It's a catch 22 - if you are honest, they might twist that and say 'no warranty if it is for non standard use'. But on the other hand, if you tell them the box is used for racing (just saying all this hypothetically) then some of the parts that might be ok for re-using in a daily driven standard car might be too far gone for racing apps.As an example - when the laygear bearings (sometimes called countershaft bearings) wear down, they allow the laygear to spin on an axis a little bit further from the gears on the input/mainshaft. As a result it starts t wear down the tips of each gear tooth. If you replace the bearings/and internal shaft, you put them back together as closely meshed as when new, but the wear on the teeth from the worn laygear allowing more clearance means they don't mesh across the full surface of each tooth like they did when new. For a non performance car, within reason, they will still last, and might have a whining noise that isn't too loud to tolerate. But for high output engines/competition use, this narrower contact pattern loads up each gear tooth in a smaller section and can lead to it failing.

I suppose the 'cheat' one can employ here (though it costs a lot up front of course) would be the idea of getting a later model gearbox from behind an L series engine and adapt it to an a series engine. Then even for performance use, if it wore down, and was rebuilt, it'd still have an extra 'safety margin' and there wouldn't be enough stress to damage the internals even under relatively hard use (for an A series at least)

It depends how far you want to go on the rebuild and how the synchros measure up. There are only 3 roller bearings in the box, a needle cage between the mainshaft and the input, needle cage under the 1,2,3 & 5 dog gears and the 2 needle cage in the sandwich plate and front case. Those 2 are unusual and harder to get but still available. All the bearings set me back last time around the $275 mark and synchros are available new for around $105 each and are the same for all gears. A full days labour. Properly done you should have a bill for $750 plus synchros. Providing of course that the hardening isnt off the mainshaft or countershaft needle roller faces which is common.

Had mine done for $500 NZD (was a sharp price, prob normally more like $600), bearings, seals and synchro's lapped..

I bought a complete kit, syncro's, bearings, seals, etc... for under $200 US & did it myself on a 60A. I did have to buy a used shifter fork to replace a broken one, got & found one for $25. I was quoted about $400 labor to do the build.

Just looking for some rough costs on getting a gearbox rebuilt or freshened up, especially those who have had 5 speeds rebuilt (60A).

Ignoring any repairs to breakages or any modifications what sort of money should I be looking to spend?

Chris