Thanks again Garry! And Ben you were totally right – roll pin was toast. And fully jammed in there. It was really hard to get the lever off because the pin broke kind of jagged, I could feel it scraping once I’d worked enough WD40 in. I ended up heating the lever, which worked nicely. Then when I was trying to get the remains of the pin out of the gear handle shaft i managed to break the punch. I’m just going to take it in to a machinist place tomorrow and if they’ll take care of it, great – if not, it’s where I bought the punch and I guess I’ll get a new one 🙂
For the record, removing that roll pin was NOT more fun than removing the powerhead. I did that anyway to make sure everything else with the shift rod was ok, and it was pretty easy.