classic motorcycle forum

Nortons were in Aston Brook St for a good many years too.
They built/extended through to Bracebridge St in short order, and that seems to have become their primary address.

Don't think any pics of Albions' Tower Works are about.
Online anyway.
Unless the press or a magazine did a feature on them.
Which might be tough to find.
The factory records might have survived ? and been archived somewhere ?
Which might be equally tough to find...

EDIT  Birmingham City Council libraries have an extensive archive of the city's history.
Including a box with 26 photos of Upper Highgate St.
Let us see if they respond to enquiries ...

Jan, one of the military history guys and Enfield enthusiast extraordinaire has located this old map.
But no photo ...

https://hmvforum.s3.amazonaws.com/monthly_2024_07/Schermafbeelding2024-07-21om17_44_45.thumb.png.337e2483db29e31749202dae0ab5dd18.png

The local roads have been somewhat altered since then in the redevelopment, and now is housing and parkland.

We diverge, still.

... it mostly used the same remote lever in a tank-side gate as the horizontal "Gen 2" (mid 1915 to 1919).

It didn't, actually: the Gen 3 has a Gen 3 lever. But no matter...

Up until 1923 all Albion gearboxes were "lightweight", to suit motors like the 269 Villiers and the 293 JAP. For 1923 Albion introduced the "featherweight" box, a 2-speeder for engines with "Max 2 h.p." - 200cc. It looked just like BF436 (the subject of this thread), but had a remote lever, so no lug on the box for the lever. I think that came about 1925, but you could get plain, clutch, and clutch+ks versions from the beginning.

So there were Albion boxes that looked just like BF436 from about 1925.

Leon

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.

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