As i have been upping the power on my 94 uk wagon turbo for the last six months the gearbox has now given up (whining and scraping in every gear) so its now of the road is there a better/stronger box i can relace it with ? like an sti one or similar ? mine has no speedo cable and ive heard you need to change the rear diff aswell to match the box you fit ? is that right

 

My advice is to sort the gearbox once, first time, and not bother with cheap fix options as you will break these eventually.
IMO what sort of power your running....and what power you are expecting to achieve will help determine what box you need. More importantly is what you use or plan to use the car for.
some options open to you are
1, to fit a newer (stronger phase 2 and less fatige due to age) wrx gear box if you are staying under 350bhp and not doing lauching every other weekend.
2, If drag/track work then u have an option of 6 speed sti box (+prop, gear link and rear diff)
3 uprated gear kit PPG or similar.

I choose the PPG kit as I wanted to keep my ratios and 5 speed for the strip.
Hope this helps.
Speak to david at API. He is the experts on gearboxes.

 

As above. Ring up API. I messed about with 'low mileage' boxes, before just getting my 5-speed box rebuilt by him. Bottom line is: it works. The later classics had a '754' box, the earlier ones up to 98 had a '752' series which isn't as strong. They are interchangeable physically but you need to get your diffs/drive ratios to match up with what you've got already AFAIK. i.e. you can't bolt a UK gearbox and rear diff straight onto your import because imports have a shorter final drive. Or something like that, I'm not an expert! :-)

 

As yours is a UK car you can fit any UK box to it (inc 6 speed sti) without changing the rear diff.
To fit a Jap box you would need to change the rear diff to a Jap one aswell.

As said if you are pushing anything over about 300 lb/ft of torque, then the chances are eventually any standard 5 speed will break (unless your lucky). So if you only want to fix it once then you only really have 2 options:

- 6 speed out of a Newage STI, £1000-£1500 for the box plus fitting (you need the 6 speed prop shaft and gear linkage to fit)
- PPG (or other uprated) Gearset, around £2700