bangbus

This sort of thing makes me chuckle. next summer it will be three whole years since I washed my Galaxy. Admittedly I did do the whole hog and turtlewaxed it but apart from warm water to de-ice the windows that has been it for cleaning. Two of my children have never seen "Daddies car" in its natural colour as they are under three. The question is, should I wash it before the next arrival in June/July ?

Pulled out the battery box and extracted the selector mechanism yesterday I was absolutly amazed to get the bolt out of the bottom of the gearbox undamaged. I used a Halfords flexible magnetic pick up tool and drained the oil after a couple of unsuccessful rooting around sessions. This tool has the advantage of being easy to mould into a "C" shape and root around in the darkest recesses of the gearbox. The "Snick" sound it made when the magnet found the bolt was very rewarding. So its back together with plenty of threadlock and done up plenty tight. A brief test drive showed the gearchange was noticeably improved, no struggle with first, no crunching on third, both of these faults I attributed to a shoddy recon box. So I really would like to thank the contributors to this thread for saving my Galaxy from the knackers yard this time. I'll have a poke around and see if I can add anything of value to future questions. Thanks again Ian

Well mine went at 111,000 miles and has gone again at 126,000 miles just five months later. I had a recon box fitted first time as it happened whilst on the move and split the gearbox casing. This time, its the same fault, gear stick is slack moving back and forth, moving the selector on the gearbox itself moves the gearstick so all the cables and linkages are intact. However it happened whilst moving out of the car park this time, so it may be salvagable. I'm going to have a go myself and if I cant fix it, it will be on ebay with a box of bits in the boot One question though, yours was a Diesel, mine is a 2300 petrol (2002 if that makes much difference), is this the same gearbox or just the same fault ?

Being a new member I cannot start a new topic so I'll add to this one for now. I have an '02 Galaxy Zetec with a Ford 6000 single CD unit which is becoming ripe for an upgrade. The speakers are noticeably fuzzy so I was planning to replace all the door speakers to begin with and possibly the windscreen and rearmost speakers if there are direct replacements for these. The first question I have relates to the wiring for these speakers. Since there are 8 in total do they all run on separate outputs from the head unit or are there four feeds FL-FR RL-RR each to a pair of speakers ? The second question is what sizes are these speakers ? I'm also plucking up the courage to fit a couple of Subs into the tailgate trim, the gas lifts seem unaffected by the weight of two ten inch subs. I taped them still in their boxes onto the door to see if the extra weight meant changing the gas lifts and it stayed up. Ian

I also had water in the passenger footwell from a detached screenwash pipe. The rear screen wash comes apart if you dont use enough screen wash in winter to prevent the pipes freezing.