ORIGINAL: cliffyk

What on earth do you mean by "rattle trap", the tranny mainshaft makes normal bearing noise when spinning; and it may well be that some make more normal noise than others due to a whole variety of normal factors.Most of which are a result of mass manufacturing, where parts are made to acceptable tolerances.[/align][/align]Some combinations of the mass produced parts are are tighter than others and noisy, othersfit together more loosely and make noise, and some combinationscome together holistically and don't make any noise. But note that none of this necessarily has anything to do with service life, although upon occassion there are assemblies "made on Mondays" or whatever that fail before anyone would like--that's just part of mass production.[/align][/align]Gettin back to the shifter, the OEMunit has a very rubbery feel because the engineers were more concerned about NVH than shifting precision, after market shifters have been deliberately designed to place shifting precision concerns above NVH. [/align][/align]So, if you've got one of the noisier trannys you'll hear more noise; if you got one of the magic moment assemblies you won't. As for whether you hear it or not there are certainly environmental conditions (temperature, ambient noise, etc.) that affect the amount of noise generated and our ability to hear it; however there is also the fact that our brains have become conditioned by 30k years of evolution to mask out noises that do not represent "alarm signals". We become conditioned to normal noises--that's why we sometimes don't hear the clock chime even though we are in the same room...[/align][/align]