Albion gearbox BF436 - where used?

[33d6]

It’s got a rocking pedal foot change on the other side. Pretty simple with a two speed box. No fancypositive stop arrangement needed. Push down as far as it will go at one end for low gear. Push the other end down as far as it will go for high gear. Let it flap around in the middle for neutral.

[cardan]

Thanks for all the info, 33d6. Fascinating. (Yeah, it's probably sad to be fascinated by Albion gearbox numbers.) I went back to the VMCC Register and I see less chaos now I get the B, BA, BAA thing. Boy they must have made a lot of gearboxes. Have you ever seen a guess at the total number?

Mixed in with the "usual" numbers there are prefixes like MON, but if you allow the possibility that (say) Monet Goyon might have been amongst the thousands of customers who used Albion gear boxes... it makes me worry less. I certainly don't intend to pursue the serial numbers further.

From my perspective, I'm specially interested in the veteran and early vintage end of things. I think I have the nailed the early progression, from the early "flat" boxes (with the main and lay shafts in the same plane) through to the first of the "vertical" boxes (with the shafts above one another), which seem to have started post WW1, and their various change lever configurations. I suspect the switch was pragmatic: the vertical boxes were shorter, and could be squeezed into frames designed as direct belt drive. At the Bendigo swap meet last year I saw a 2-speed Albion box that was labelled "Levis". I pointed out to the seller that the word Levis was not cast into the gearbox itself, but into an adaptor that sat atop the box to allow it to bolt straight into the single-speed Levis frame. Of course I had to get to the bottom of that puzzle when I got home - see below.

Cheers

Leon

[R]

Offered for longer than that short period

[33d6]

I like the oil filling system shown on those ads. A hollow mounting bolt with a cycle lubricator on top. I wonder how long it took to fill the box through that.

[cardan]

Yes the lubricator is a ripper, but I could imagine having a ritual where the oiler was filled before each ride and allowed to slowly drip in just to keep things topped up. Looking at period illustrations and survivors is seemed to last only for a couple of years after WW1.

Re the longevity of the boxes themselves, I call the model illustrated above "Gen 3": the first of the vertical boxes. It ran from early postwar (say 1919 but effectively 1920) to the end of 19221, and it mostly used the same remote lever in a tank-side gate as the horizontal "Gen 2" (mid 1915 to 1919). For 1922 there was an entirely new arrangement, with the gear change mechanism coming out of the front of the gb case rather than the end cover, with new change levers to suit.

Of course in Australia we often ran a bit behind the times. For example the 1922 models from Elliott Payneham here in Adelaide used the last of the 269 Villiers engines (Mk V) and the ageing horizontal "Gen 2" Albion gearbox. The gearbox was shown in their not-very-clear line drawing, listed in their parts list, and has survived on a couple of very original 1922 survivors. The saddle tank was pretty modern for 1922 though.

Leon