Hitchcocks Forum

Working on the Series 2 Interceptor yesterday, thought I'd better check gear selection properly before fitting the outer cover. What a bl**dy drama! A whole day I've spent on it, never had so much trouble building an Albion box before. At first could only get 1st and 2nd and 4 neutrals, Eventually discovered that if I reversed the selector fork inside the box (even though it was the way it came out,) I could get more gears and fewer neutrals. Much work on the selector mechanism doing a trial and error selective assembly with spares I have under the bench has got a box that is approximately ok. Along the way the kickstart spring broke leaving a section stuck in the kickstart shaft which will have to be spark eroded, fortunately I have spares of both. Last job was to fit the cover over the clutch adjuster only to find the thread is stripped. The trials of building a bike from a basket case! I'm off to the pub!
REgards, Mark

Hi Mark, been there done that many time, I have spent days getting a box to work and I have had that on many boxes. Then I rebuilt the box on a Super Meteor and it took a couple of hours and that included going up the street to get bearings for it.

Norm, that's pretty much my experience too! Most boxes go together pretty easily and apart from shimming the mainshaft and setting up the selector plate as best you can they work ok. This one is a real pig, having got 4 gears and a neutral where it should be I'll have to live with it for now and give it more attention if needed when the bike is actually running! REgards, Mark

Just for background, this bike came here in the huge haul of parts Hitchcocks brought back 2 years ago. All the matching parts are correct but it was completely dismantled and many parts were missing such as instruments, tank, seat, exhaust system, many engine parts, etc etc etc. The gearbox was complete but looking rather dirtier and sadder than the rest of it! Opening it up revealed many worn gears and shot bearings and bushes. Close examination revealed that someone had played with the selector mechanism at some time in the past so maybe this 'box always had "issues". Lucky me eh! REgards, Mark

Hi Mark, I did a Bullet box a couple of months ago that gave unbelievable problems, I couldn't see anything wrong but in the end to get it to work I had to weld and regrind every tooth on the inner ratchet, get it to select one gear, then move on to the next, get that to select and move on. Problem is you have 4 on the upshift and 4 on the downshift and I had to modify every one of them. In the end it works perfectly but took me probably 4 days of head hurting