Gearbox oil change intervals

[james butler]

dispite what I've been told over the years about never having to change gearbox oil I have always replaced it in every car I have had and again every 3-5 years.
This months practical classics shows how to service a mk1 golf and what did I notice! "Change your gear oil every two years or 25000miles" now this usually applied only to autos but I've been adamant for years about how much better a manual feels after an oil change!
Plus it gets out all the wear and tear crud out of your box!

[james butler]

so after all this time i can finally say " i bloody knew it!"

[Tim_R]

I should probably do mine, I've had the oil sat on the shelf for 3 years now, it was a gearbox liberated from a scrap yard and of unknown condition back then so I didn't fancy putting new oil straight in and just haven't got around to it since.

[eefy]

hmmmm had mine 6 years never got round to changing it!!!! to be fair its only done 13000 miles in that time!!!!!!

[mark1gls]

My gearbox in the Mk1 golf is still nice and smooth and no 2nd gear crunch and I have only change it every 100,000 miles. The cars has done 269,000 miles so I've changed it twice and I've had the car 20 years and got it when it had only covered 60,000 miles.
I don't really do much town driving as living in Somerset there's a lot of country roads so that may of helped but even more shocking is it's still on the original clutch!

[james butler]

My gearbox in the Mk1 golf is still nice and smooth and no 2nd gear crunch and I have only change it every 100,000 miles. The cars has done 269,000 miles so I've changed it twice and I've had the car 20 years and got it when it had only covered 60,000 miles.
I don't really do much town driving as living in Somerset there's a lot of country roads so that may of helped but even more shocking is it's still on the original clutch!

your so lucky!
when i changed the clutch on my old mk2 golf it had an origenal clutch and that had done 270000 miles so i can believe it.
however with my driving style it would be lucky to last 30000.

[Macc]

James changed my gearbox oil the other week, when it came out it was "fizzing"! Probably had never been changed from new, or at the very least, not since 2008 when it was SORN'd. My gear changes are now noticeably better but more importantly, peace of mind, knowing it has fresh stinky stuff in

[type53b]

how many litres doe it take and what grade of oil does it use? ep 90?

[farley381]

My ten-penneth.

I believe that for all of the water-cooled VWs (74 onwards?) the manual gearbox all was "filled for life", changing it was never mentioned anywhere in the service book. I guess at that time though "life" was around 10 years or 100,000 miles. So that's what I have used as a rule of thumb. I changed the oil in my GTX earlier this year & the difference in the gearchange was very noticeable.

The important thing is to use GL4 spec oil, apparently GL5 is no so good with the metal in older bearings.
I used Valvolene Max Life 75/90 (GL-4) Fully Synthetic, which I got from EuroCarParts.

When I was looking into it I found a dead good American article, by a bloke who must live & breath 020 gearboxes.
http://www.brokevw.com/020oil.html

It still left me wondering if the capacity was 2L or 1.5L. So I drained the gearbox & measured what came out = 1.5L

[farley381]

<back from my tea>

Stating the obvious, make sure you can undo the filler nut before you empty the oil (I had a right job with mine, even with a breaker-bar).
Best to work by removing front wheel & access everything through the wheel-arch.
When you come to re-fill with new oil I needed quite a long pipe from the bottle.
Also, I jacked it up quite high on nearside, stops the oil running out again when you try to force it in.

Good luck.