I would be very interested to know who made the gearbox - normally it would have been Burman, Albion etc. where the input shaft and the output shaft were concentric (quill shaft - direct drive in top gear therefore in theory more efficient) - not the same layout as the modern boxes, (the little "buzz bombs" of the sixties changed all that), because you couldn't have them in top gear for more than a minute at a time anyway! - I do know, I rode one a lot!
In the case of the layout of common style boxes back in the day however, the gearbox shaft and output sprocket would now rotate "backwards" with the gear primary drive, that's assuming of course that the engine rotated "forwards". - (I'm sure I could have said all that using a lot less words!)
Did they make their own gears or did some of the gearbox makers do a special one for New Imperial?
That machine is an example of the direction the British Industry
should have been taking - just shows that we don't recognize forward thinking when we see it - until it's too late!
We get a picture into our "blinkered" heads of what a motorcycle should look like and anything different is considered "rubbish"!
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