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
