Reply To: Shift detent on McCullouch 9 low profile?

[billw]

Thanks for both those posts. I do have a genuine, paper McCullough parts book, and even a rudimentary ABOS service manual, that covers my exact gear case. It did show a detent ball and spring but it wasn’t clear to me how it worked, until I took it apart yesterday, at lunch. It does have a three-position detent setup. When I hold the shift cradle and bearing housing in my hands, it will definitively snap into forward, neutral and reverse. When I assemble it into the gear housing, I loose the feel of forward and reverse, when I use the proper shift shaft. If I pull the shift shaft out and shift the unit with a long, wide-blade screw driver, I can feel all three detents. Everything APPEARS, to my eye, to be in good condition and not bent, worn, etc. The mystery continues.

Like my Mercury automatics, this is definitely a “think-outside-the-box” kind of motor, which makes it interesting to me. There is one aggravating thing about it, though. The drive shaft drives the pinion gear with a very small, square key. The two water pumps are mounted on a thin plate, one above, and one below the plate. This plate is sandwiched between the gear housing and the drive shaft housing. When you drop the lower unit, the plate with the pumps tends to want to stay with the drive shaft housing, rather than the gear case. That means the drive shaft pulls out of the gear housing, and the little key drops into the gear case. You have to pull the case apart and find the key, then reassemble it, which is not entirely, intuitively obvious how to do. The manual doesn’t mention this tid bit. So then, after reassembling it, you put the gear case aside, forget the trauma, then go back later, pick the case up by the drive shaft and it pull right out again, so you have to take it apart all over again!

Long live American manufacturing!