Harris 5 speed gearsets

Anyone have an issue with the new made Harris 5 speed Triumph gearsets? Is a good used original Triumph box better or worse than the new made bits? Price difference isn't huge.

Onder said:

Anyone have an issue with the new made Harris 5 speed Triumph gearsets? Is a good used original Triumph box better or worse than the new made bits? Price difference isn't huge.

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I fitted a Harris box to my 68 and it was fine, looked good, went together well, worked well.

I’d have no worries buying another.

But… I read somewhere once that Meriden gears were really excellent quality. So a NOS or low mileage Meriden box would be the best choice I reckon.

Failing that, if it’s a choice between an unknown mileage / unknown history old cluster (which could have mix n match pattern gears in it etc), and a new Harris cluster, then I’d go Harris.

Looks like six of one half dozen of the other. I suppose I should face the fact that at this point in life wearing out
the gears and shafts is bloody unlikely!

Onder said:

Anyone have an issue with the new made Harris 5 speed Triumph gearsets? Is a good used original Triumph box better or worse than the new made bits? Price difference isn't huge.

Click to expand...

I found various problems with new LFH 5 speed gearboxes, one of them serious. I bought a complete LFH gearbox for one of my project bikes. The taper on the mainshaft for the clutch hub was wrongly ground, ie: the angle was too steep, meaning the hub would rock and would never grip, relying entirely on the Woodruff key to prevent it rotating (which would last about a mile). When I told LFH about this they apologised and sent a replacement mainshaft with a new hub. It was almost as bad. LFH sent yet another shaft. This one was close, but I needed to lap the hub to the taper in order for it to grip properly. I also had problems with the camplate. I couldn't select gears - the indexing was correct but it didn't want to move above 2nd. Turned out there was a tiny burr at one of the three rivets on the camplate, catching on a selector fork.

When closely inspecting the gears, they appeared crudely finsihed compared to genuine Triumph gears, ie: visible machining marks on the teeth faces. I decided to remove the new LFH box and fit a good condition genuine but used one. I'm not confident that the steel used is of equal quality to genuine Triumph, though I have no evidence that it isn't - just concerns stemming from the other issues destroying my confidence in the product.

I've noticed that at least one retailer has cautionary text at the end of their description for this gearbox, stating that it is not approved for racing use. There must be a reason for this.

What bothers me is the spread of prices for a LFH gearset. One has to wonder if , as you note, there are seconds on offer.
Probably the best bet is to go with a reputable dealer who will allow you to examine before you purchase and accept returns
after you buy.
Old boxes in good shape are not easy to find. If you look on ebay you will see most have pitted teeth or corrosion due to sitting
and collecting water over time. I've had several Triumph 5 speeds and only once, back in the early 70s, did I have a gearset
show a problem. That was third gear faces showing hairline cracks in only about 10k miles. Replaced with a used pair and
never had a problem again.
Breaking a tooth when driving can place you on your ear to put it mildly.

I don't think the gearbox defects can be explained by there being seconds on offer. The first one (part of a complete 5 speed gearbox) came from a reputable supplier, who passed me on to LFH directly when I told them about the mainshaft issue. Mark at LFH was very helpful and immediately sent me a replacement mainshaft and clutch hub. He clearly hadn't offered the hub up to the shaft because it, too, rocked due to mis-matched tapers. He then sent me another (just a shaft). This one was better but still not perfect, either with the LFH hub or a genuine Triumph hub. The LFH hub was a good fit to a genuine Triumph mainshaft, so it was their mainshafts that had been wrongly made.

The camplate was also replaced with a good one but by the time it arrived I'd already decided to use a good used one from an old gearbox. The new camplates are made differntly - I think they're laser cut, whereas the originals were stamped. The finish to the 'walls' of the selector fork pin grooves is relatively rough compared to genuine Triumph - you can see hundreds of tiny straight lines making up the curves. Same with the gear teeth - whatever machine tools are used to cut and finish the teeth give a visibly rougher finish compared to genuine Triumph gears (I have a few loose new genuine gears for comparison), so it isn't just that I'm comparing old gears which have become polished through use. In fact, it looks as if genuine gear teeth are finsihed by grinding whereas the LFH teeth appear not to have been ground, just machined with cutting tools, albeit to quite a fine finish considering.

This was several years ago and since then, when I've seen VGC used boxes I've bought them, for future projects, rather than resort to the modern copies. Good ones do crop up but as you say, a lot of those for sale are not as good as the sellers say they are! Tooth face pitting seems the commonest fault.