Modern Buddy

A friend brought by her Stella 2t looking to get it back in fighting shape after a low end bearing failure.

Rebuilt the thing with a new crank, piston, gaskets, bearings, and buttoned it up again following instructions to a "T".

all seemed well till I go to roll it out of the garage and check the shift cable set up. Apparently I must have switched a gear around or something during re-assembly because now 1st is neutral and neutral is 1st! .

My question for you guys is simple, I have no idea what the hell I did to make this possible, but has anyone else managed to bugger things up as well as I have?
Any one else have an idea what I've done wrong?

I'm stumped and really don't want to rip this thing down again. Especially when I don't know what I did wrong.

I couldn't find anything after 4 hours of forum browsing so maybe I'm just an idiot. Any help/laughter at my expense is greatly appreciated.

Did you detach the shift cables from the shifter box when you rebuilt the motor? I suspect your gear cables are reversed. The cable on the outboard side pulls the upshifts and the inboard side pulls the downshifts.

A tip to avoid this when pulling a motor for service: remove the shift box from the motor with the cables attached and swing it back up onto the floorboard. It saves you the trouble of setting up the shift cables after reinstalling the motor. Yust remember to reinstall it befor adding oil to the transmission.

nope, no cables detached, just flipped the whole shebang onto the floor boards.
I reset the cable tension and adjusters as they were extremely out of spec when she brought it by.