Thread: When is a landy NOT a landy?

Originally Posted by harry

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• The LT95 gearbox is a DavidBrown --lt95 'lt' is 'leyland transmissions'

[snip]

Doesn't mean David Brown Gears didn't have a hand or solely develop it for Leyland. (although it's the first I've heard of it)
DBG have been around for a long time.

The main designer of the LT95 was Frank Shaw.

This is an extract from an interview with him in 1996 from LRO Mag

"Many years later, you were also involved with the design of the original Range Rover gearbox

That was one of the mistakes that I made. I let Tommy Barton talk me into something which I should never have done. At the time when we were doing Range Rover, Tommy and Jack Pogmore were doing the lOl-inch Forward Control vehicle, and they were convinced that this vehicle was going to absolutely make the company. They convinced me. The problem was, we had two vehicles but we could only have one gearbox. We'd got the money to build one gearbox. Tommy Barton and Pogmore persuaded me to make the gearbox suitable for the FC, and it was really too big for the Range Rover. It didn't really matter very much, but unfortunately I never did get that gearchange right. It was too big, too much inertia, and with a vehicle like the Range

Rover you drive it like a car. People want to slip down into second without any trouble at all. In the Forward Control it didn't matter, but in the Range Rover it did. So the Range Rover had a reputation for reliability greater than any vehicle has ever had - they could do what they liked with it, they would never ever bust that gearbox! And it had a terrible reputation for gearchanging. I regretted that I should have told them, 'No, you've got to get money for a bigger 'box'. I should never have fallen for it. But it was just one of those things. They'd got plenty of proof... they were going to sell thousands of these things, and of course it didn't happen.

One of the things I did on the Range Rover gearbox to suit Pogmore and Tom was to make a transfer that would give you the same speed of output on the power take-off and the axle, for towing a powered trailered gun. And that caused a little bit of complication that wouldn't normally have been there.