Just wanted to let everyone know.. in my 5SP manual I was having problems with gear changes, quite often hard-ish to get in gear, quite notchy in 3rd.. every so often it would free up quite nicely.

I've had 2 lots of oil in it recently with the same problem, one was Penrite 75W-90 i think and another was mitsu spec (75W-85W) but unknown brand possibly LSA.. both the same in behavior.

Speaking to my mechanic about this, he has put in a fully synthetic oil which is a bit thinner and my problems have gone away and back like it was when I first got it and did a change to the penrite, so so so much better. Third gear is still a bit notchy that's obviously slightly worn but i've not really noticed it now and always much easier to get into gear smoothly. Unfortunately I'm not sure what the new oil is I'll have to check with him.


So just a bit of advice.. if you are having any problems with your manual might be worth looking at that/discussing with your mech.. my mechanic was saying that with a bit of a thicker oil the gears are so big in these gearboxes it creates alot of fluid turbulence and makes it a bit hard to spin up/down when changing gears/speed.. hence a thinner oil might help a bit and wow has it!

Just in case someone has a bit of an issue might be worth a thought.

Just wanted to let everyone know.. in my 5SP manual I was having problems with gear changes, quite often hard-ish to get in gear, quite notchy in 3rd.. every so often it would free up quite nicely.

I've had 2 lots of oil in it recently with the same problem, one was Penrite 75W-90 i think and another was mitsu spec (75W-85W) but unknown brand possibly LSA.. both the same in behavior.

Speaking to my mechanic about this, he has put in a fully synthetic oil which is a bit thinner and my problems have gone away and back like it was when I first got it and did a change to the penrite, so so so much better. Third gear is still a bit notchy that's obviously slightly worn but i've not really noticed it now and always much easier to get into gear smoothly. Unfortunately I'm not sure what the new oil is I'll have to check with him.


So just a bit of advice.. if you are having any problems with your manual might be worth looking at that/discussing with your mech.. my mechanic was saying that with a bit of a thicker oil the gears are so big in these gearboxes it creates alot of fluid turbulence and makes it a bit hard to spin up/down when changing gears/speed.. hence a thinner oil might help a bit and wow has it!

Just in case someone has a bit of an issue might be worth a thought.

A thinner oil (so that means a lower weight number) can cause more gearbox noise especially bearing "rollover" noise and can also cause issues when it gets hot and thins out more (which can cause scyhro wear and gear clash as the oil gets "flung" off the teeth faces), hence why i run Redline MT90 in my magnas gearbox (im also running it in my evo's gearbox) with no issues and it has improved the shift nicely.

The factory fill oil is actually Castrol VMX-M (which is a 80 weight oil specifically formulated for mitsubishi manual transmissons)
Castrol sell VMX80 as well as the VMX-M