overdrive (Borg-Warner or so)

[114015]

Gentlemen,

Does anybody of you have an overdrive in his drive train - especially in combination with the automatic transmission?
A friend of mine is very interested in this conversion - if possible.

Are there any options? Borg-Warner what unit? Or another one?

Any information highly appreciated.

Thanks a lot
&
best,

Achim
(04/'69)

[Mike Hughes]

The most common overdrive units were by Laycock de Normanville, and found exclusively on manual transmissions.  Typical applications were in M.G.s, Triumphs, Volvos, Austin Healeys., etc.  Many American makes used Columbia two-speed rear axles.  Studebaker and Rambler employed them right up into the 60's.

Automatic transmissions were developed with internal overdrive gear ratios, rather than add-on units.

[Shvegel]

Volvo fitted the Laycock overdrive(built by Borg Warner) to their automatic transmissions but the problem with our cars is the automatic transmission is just long enough to fit in the driveshaft tunnel without having to cut it apart.  The Laycock would add another 25cm of so to the length.  I looked at a number of other automatics but they are all very long.  I assume this is the reason the W113 was fitted with the older automatics after Mercedes updated the sedans.

 Your options are to convert to a manual overdrive gearbox or switch to a higher ( lower number) gear ratio in the rear axle.

[mnahon]

A previous member of the group, Tom Forsythe, fitted an overdrive to a Pagoda with AT; and wrote a Pagoda World article about it. There are some details given in this post, and maybe older posts too.

https://www.sl113.org/forums/index.php?topic=7532.msg47739#msg47739