Drill with synchromesh????

Right. Of course you could completely replace the internals. IIRC Knight made a 5 speed conversion with straight cut gears. Sounded wonderful.;-)

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)
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Which is cheap to do. It also lets you play with the ratios. In terms of manufacturing a small-volume gearbox, the case is the most boring component, yet the most expensive to manufacture. There's a lot of sense in "re-using" a mass-market gearbox, when the tweaked version actually has almost nothing important in common.

Whatever happend to Jack Knight ? Last I heard they were working on an all-mechanical non-viscous torque-splitting diff that felt like a viscous diff, but wasn't. Worked well, but it turned nasty once there was any wear in it.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

I'd say 'cheap' is a relative term. I was looking at the cost of re-manufactured internals for an Austin Healey, and cheap they ain't - compared to a maker's spare.

Many of this sort of things have been replaced by electronics - or electronic based, which tends to move the design to different people.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

They're still very much in business down in Woking. I have a JKD 5-speed box on my Mini Marcos. It's the helical touring box. They also do 5- and

6-speed cross-cut dog boxes for racing. Another Mini Marcos won the "Fastest Mini In The World" title at Silverstone this year with a 5-port A-series engine and Jack Knight gearbox, beating all sorts of exotic stuff (and BMW MINIs).
Reply to
Richard Porter

That's where things headed in 1961, and once Lotus got their act in gear, even removing material, and hence weight, from those gears.

Reply to
G&M

I thought they mostly used Hewland boxes?

Reply to
Richard Porter

Once Hewland released their first ubiquitous F1 box (the F100 I think) then that's right. And of course later on the Cossie/Hewland became the basis of most cars other than the Ferrari.

Though Lotus did try their own one again with the 69, 78 and 86/88. The 78 also had a locked diff.

Reply to
G&M

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