Alfa 156 Selespeed gearbox problem solved!

[Evan Bottcher]

Recently we had a fairly expensive sounding problem with our 2000 156 Monza Selespeed.  Fiona reported that the car was making some funny noises in first gear and had been a bit jerky particularly taking off from standstill.  Ew sounds very expensive indeed.  Especially the grinding noise that sounded like a bucket of self-tappers had been poured into the gearbox...

So off to Uncle Damon the car went and I prepared to speak to the bank manager at length about the joys of italian car ownership.  I thought everyone might be interested in the result.

Turns out the problem was that the input shaft bearing on the gearbox had collapsed (source of afore-mentioned bucket-of-screws-in-gearbox sound), and that this had allowed enough movement of the input shaft to start to chew into the selespeed speed sensor.  This supposedly causes a load of interesting messages to be sent to the selespeed computer, hence the jerky clutch action that we'd been experiencing.  Attached is a couple of snaps of the sensor itself with a big gouge out of the front.

Changing the input shaft bearing did require a gearbox out of car excursion and strip-down - thanks to the guys at Lance Dixon the car was back on the road very quickly and wow - now Fi and I both realise that the selespeed has not been well for some time...  The difference in smooth changes just from changing the sensor (and perhaps recalibration) is incredible.  I'm back in favour of the selespeed gearbox, having been a bit suss about it in recent times.

Thanks again to Damon and crew at Lance Dixon Alfa.