Norman White article from Classic Racer '91

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Thought this may be of some interest - especially the gearbox issues and subsequent clutch outrigger setup

Norman White article from Classic Racer '91


Norman White article from Classic Racer '91
 
Thanks for the article and sensation of a Combat pulling 150 mph! Remember the swing arm fuel pump being pumped up prior to take off that performed so well the competitors began pumping on theirs too :lol:
 
Bruce Verdon mentioned that his TTI gearbox is similar to the Schafleitner. I wonder if the mainshaft was the same diameter back in the 70s ?
 
acotrel said:
Bruce Verdon mentioned that his TTI gearbox is similar to the Schafleitner. I wonder if the mainshaft was the same diameter back in the 70s ?

That surprises me some. The Shaftleitner 6-speed had the reputation of being more suited to the Manx and G50 sort of racers, and not quite strong enough for the Commando engines. Nova, whose 6-speed is based on the Shaftleitner design, still does not recommend using it with Commando engines, although they do mention that if you do so, it needs some sort of outrigger bearing for support. Everything I've seen seems to indicate that the TTI is a much sturdier box than either the Shaftleitner or the older Quaife designs.

In any case, I believe that Norton generally used Quaife 5-speed gearsets in their race bikes, not the Shaftleitner 6-speed. I visited Norman back when he was starting on his first replica of the '72 JPN, but the frame was still in the jig at the time, so I didn't see what he planned to use for a gearbox.

Ken
 
Hi the Petty Summerfield box is the Shaflier. The TTI is very different/substantial.
Chris
 
Yep. Colin Seeley was buying Shaftleitner gearboxes for his sidecars in the early '60s. He liked them so well that in 1967 he became the UK importer of the 5 and 6 speed Shaftleitners. He offered them as an option on the Seeley G50 Matchless racers he was building at the time. If I recall correctly, when I started racing a Commando PR in 1972 you could still buy a new Shaftleitner 6-speed, but I never knew anyone who used one. We mostly used Quaife 5-speeds. Somewhere in the middle '70s the design was taken over by Ray Petty, and later sold to the Summerfield brothers, who still manufacture it as the PGT. I'm not sure where the change from importing the gearboxes from Shaftleitner to manufacturing them as Petty gearboxes took place. Maybe someone on the list can add some more detail.

Nova describe their gearbox as being based on the Shaftleitner design, but not an exact copy. That's all I know about it. Again, maybe someone here on the list can add info.

My understanding was also that the TTI is a much more robust gearbox. That's why I brought up the question when Alan said they were similar. Back when I was racing 920 Commando engine bikes I would have been at the head of the line for a TTI gearbox, but that was before their time.

Ken
 
acotrel said:
Was the Quaife box cassette construction ?


Not the one I've got. It's just like a Norton unit inside. Depending which one you have, you may or may not be able to use a kick start with it.

My 5 speed Quaife might be up for sale in a couple of months when the bike finally gets road registered.
 
Thanks for that . Tripped over pictures of the mainshaft etc once , from his callsign , but unable to refind them .
will postem if I come over them again . The real McCoy ; the works mainshaft support bearing assembly .
Were a good few needle rollers in there , If I remember rightley .
 
I've sreen norton gearboxes behing cut-off Vincent motors in road race sidecars. Perhaps the speed the clutch rotates at might determine whether the mainshaft is overloaded by the torque ? Need bigger engine sprockets and smaller gearbox sprockets ? i.e. spin the gearbox faster.
 
acotrel said:
I've sreen norton gearboxes behing cut-off Vincent motors in road race sidecars. Perhaps the speed the clutch rotates at might determine whether the mainshaft is overloaded by the torque ? Need bigger engine sprockets and smaller gearbox sprockets ? i.e. spin the gearbox faster.


That's what the works JPNs did in '72. They spun the box faster to reduce the torque on the gearbox.
 
Schafleitner 6-speeders are fragile. I had gears brake twice on my Manx in the last few years. Not surprising, really. The six gears are much narrower as they go into the normal shell, i.e. where one normally has 4 gears, not 6.

On Quaiffe 5-speeders I had but one gear go in the 1970 Production Racer that had it fitted from new and has lived on public roads in its first owners hands. So no idea how many miles it has done. Mick Hemmings helped, getting a gear that was nearly right. Nothing a little spark eroding could not adapt..... Quaiffe changed its desing over the years.

Joe/Andover Norton
 
pommie john said:
acotrel said:
I've sreen norton gearboxes behing cut-off Vincent motors in road race sidecars. Perhaps the speed the clutch rotates at might determine whether the mainshaft is overloaded by the torque ? Need bigger engine sprockets and smaller gearbox sprockets ? i.e. spin the gearbox faster.


That's what the works JPNs did in '72. They spun the box faster to reduce the torque on the gearbox.


Based on information from the right source that is what I did too in '75...it works....but I used a 4 speed Quaife Manx ratio gearset....no kickstart and a ball bearing insetad of the kickstart bush.....it did not break behind a strong 850....

But of course the 4 speed was mainly fine when all the guys with 5 Speeds were push starting in 2nd and I was in 1st, actually the same ratio, since the 4 of a the 4 speed were the same as the top 4 of the 5 speed.....just slipped the clutch RRT2 style coming out of slow hairpins....

Of course today the 5 Speed (and 6 if I had been able to) is the choice to get off the line with a clutch start.....

Reinforced in my mind in May when I raced Chris' Rickman with a 4 Speed.....
 
Seeley did import clusters from Michael Shaftleitner for a while, but then he, surely with some help, started manufacturing cheaper copies of it in England that had less needle bearings and more bushings.
Michael Shaftleitner took him to court in the U.K. but the switch to bushings was said to be enough to make it a "new" design. Shaftleitner's gearbox business was largely destroyed and replaced by Seeley's and other offerings.

Shaftleitner's six speed is made with narrow gears and it all fits right in the stock AMC shell, and it was the first practical 5-6 speeder that was trouble-free. Those who got them first, like Rudi Thalhammer, started winning races right off the bat and they sold like hotcakes for a while.

I have all the old correspondence between Berliner and Michael Shaftleitner from the 60s when they were making inquiries and purchasing some clusters either for customers or their own use. Because it all fit into the standard AMC shell with no spacers etc. it was something that no one had to know about.

Nova does make a descendant of the Shaftleitner 6 speeder but they say it has a few changes in it.

They were generally used in bikes of 500cc or less. One source said that Buddy Parriot had a Shaftleitner 5-speed in his Manx back in the 60s that his competition never knew about until decades later when the bike was restored.
Heinz Kegler ended up with a 6-speeder for a Manx around 66' or 67' and did some creative work on it to make it work in his works Daytona 88 racer despite it's short Manx mainshaft. He ran it in competition for half a dozen years and It is still in good working conditon, maybe because it only had 250cc cylinders pounding on it.
 
Spotted this in a 2008 Classic Racer comic

Norman White article from Classic Racer '91


Clearly a departure from the trad Quaife design - more TTI-ish.

I bought a 5-speed with kickstart from Mick for my Proddy Racer, and I was a bit surprised that it came with a stock-looking shell. Looks beefier than a standard Norton, but none of the Gucci fluting I always associated with the Real McCoy.

Quick look at http://www.novaracing.co.uk/norton-6-speed.htm shows some rather slim gears - more 7R than 1007cc?
A Very Small clutch would be required, I would think?

Norman White article from Classic Racer '91
 
The TTI box looks about 1 inch longer, however inside it looks like no British or Japanese item I've ever seen. The modern superbike and GP bikes might be similar cassette construction ? I wonder how Gilera did 7 gears back in the fifties ? I believe the Schafleitner had a cam plate in it. I've seen a 6 speed with a squirrel cage on the outside which was operated by pawls and a trapezium gear lever .
 
beng said:
Because it all fit into the standard AMC shell with no spacers etc. it was something that no one had to know about.

Thanks for the additional history Ben. You have a real treasure trove of saved info from the period.

I do wonder about the spacer part. I have a clip from an article about aftermarket AMC gearbox history (don't know where from, though) that says the first Shaftleitner 6-speed, the one he did for Thalhammer, used a spacer plate, under an inch thick. Did the later designs do away with it? I did notice that the pictures of the Nova 6-speed on their web site don't show a spacer. I've never seen much about the Shaftleitner 5-speed. Could it be that the 5-speed, like the Quaife 5-speed, didn't use a spacer plate, but the 6-speed did? Do you have any pictures of the Shaftleitner boxes that you could post? I'm just trying to get the history straight. This stuff fascinates me.

Ken
 
For the last 12 months, I've been stuffing around fitting the 6 speed TTI box to my Seeley 850. R ecently I've been working away from home on a house, however this will finish next week. There are two ride days coming up - one on 4th November, the other on 1st December. I'm now bereft of funds and in debt, however I'm still going to try to get the bike out again to try the new box - probably in December. Should be really great. I've found that I've had to change sprockets in steps of two teeth to get sense from the chains, and I think I am still one tooth too low on the front sprocket. I use single row primary chain with floating Jawa speedway sprockets because the TTI box causes the clutch to sit out about 5mm ( I use a Norton racing clutch ). So I've got to find a bigger Jawa sprocket or have a blank splined to suit. It's not a big problem, however I'm not interested in riding the bike while it is under geared. With the 6 speeder and the torquey motor it should turn out some real speed at the ends of the straights, when the overall gearing is high.
 
All the correspondence I have between Schaftleitner and USA Norton distributor Berliner is from 1964 onwards. The six-speed box that Berliner got from Schaftleitner was sent over as a complete four speed box which Schaftleitner converted to six speeds which all fit inside the stock AMC box, again so when I first got a look at Kegler's Daytona 88 racer I thought it was still a four speed.

I talked to Stanley Friduss once, who is the original owner of a 1959 Norton Daytona 88 racer and who raced it for many years up and down the eastern USA in road races sanctioned by the AMA and other clubs against George Rockett and the Kegler Domi and he remembered very well that it had the advantage of a 6-speed gearbox to help it run away from him and others on it's way to some championships and high finishes in various races during the 1960s.
 
Even a close ratio 4 speed box is good with the torquey motor, however I don't like cooking the clutch to get the bike off the start line in our modern format races. To have a 6 speeder in the 60s would have been excellent.
 
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