Hitchcocks Forum

I thought I'd write this as you lot could do with a laugh.

The kickstart pawl plate needed replacing, so I bought a kit from our Hosts and decided to do the job last Saturday. The job was simple enough. Remove the levers. Remove some screws. Remove some gubbins. Watch in horror as green goo oozed all over the garage floor as the catch tray wouldn't fit under the gearbox because the main stand was in the way. Replace broken pawl plate. Bolt everything back together again. Fill up the gearbox with grease. Mop up the green goo. Check that everything works. Now, here's the catch.

Everything did work. However, I had a bolt that didn't do anything in it's hole and I had a leftover creasent moon piece of metal. It's taken me 4 days to figure it out. The clues were that the engine was harder to start because the kickstart wouldn't behave. It travelled further than it normally does. When I stopped the engine. The kickstart would belt me in the back of the leg. Then it dawned on me. That creasent moon shaped piece of metal was the kickstart stop plate and the 'redundant' bolt was the retainer. I must've undone the bolt thinking that it needed removing to get the inner gearbox cover off. Now I'll have to take the gearbox apart again. I am a pratt!

-------------- but a nice pratt, for all that !! "None but the brave"...eh ????

Nothing vetnured nothing gained eh!

Nothing vetnured nothing gained eh!

I must admit, I have a singular loathing for the gearbox. Whoever designed it, should be taken out and shot in front of Jeremy Clarkson. I've worked on heaps of gearboxes before (mostly BSA's) and although they weren't a joy to work on, I got them right first time, every time. I've had to change the pawl plate twice now. Both times I've had to take the gearbox apart twice because of the stupid design!

Possibly a little unfair, I too slagged off the Albion box in my early days,on this forum but I was rightly brought to heal. it's to all intents and purposes a 1930's gearbox with a few refinements. It has the singular advantage of being able to be totally stripped in the machine. The vast majority of its "issues" are brought on by a poorly adjusted clutch and all in all having worked on Burmans and Albions and a host of other unit construction cog boxes I don't see that it's any worse or more complicated than any other with the exception of the Vespa gearbox which is outrageously simple and clever although also delicate.

I have to agree Simon once you have had them apart a few times they are pretty simple. Only bit I dislike is the clutch arm setup because it just doesn't allow enough lift on the clutch plates which then causes so many other issues with draggin/slipping/fause neutrals

The issues I have is the lever on the outer plate that connects to the stub inside the box so you can actually change the gears. What a crummy piece of design! You can't see one part connecting to the other, you have to do it by feel. Get it wrong, no gears and the box has to come apart again. The same goes for the ratchet plate that goes in the outer cover. Put that on upside down, no gears! At least I can write "Top" on the plate to prevent that happening again. Oh yeah, the gears are upside down. I'm not a fan of that. As for my clutch. That works very nicely. I've never had any problem with it.

Hi Barry, what I have started doing to a few clutches lately is putting a clutch push pad( the one used to lift the pressure plate) fitting that inside the outer cover so that the lever arm has a flat surface to push onto instead of hoping it pushes square on the end of the rod. Seems to help trying to fix a bad design, problem is you are only talking fractions of a mm to have a clutch that works well or doesn't

It is a shame that they changed to the internal clutch operation without giving a tad more thought although I'm sure its fine when the cover was made to spec rather than cast only microns thick. The previous design with the triple start threaded clutch operator worked brilliantly and gave a phenomenally light clutch operation. As for the selector mechanism I've always thought it was pretty good and it clearly only makes sense one way around also it's easy enough to test as you assemble it.