About me and how I got into building PG1 gearboxes. I am Andrew Goater. I live in Keighley which is in Yorkshire, England. Our house is located in the heart of the Pennine hills which means around us are lots of steep hills which in turn means low geared cars are very welcome! In my early years classic Mini's were popular and I would modify them to improve performance. After owning lots of these and finding the A series engine and gearbox very unreliable plus expensive, I decided to build a Rover K series Mini. A donor Rover Vi was bought for it's engine and gearbox. The rest was scrapped. A subframe kit was available to bolt all this to a Mini shell. I never even considered the gearbox when doing this work.
The car took some work but did eventually become roadworthy. We found very quickly that the engine was 143bhp and the gearbox was designed for 16" wheels where the Mini was on 13" meaning the gearing was awful! 4200rpm at 70mph in 5th. So, I did some research and found you can adapt the K series case to suit a diesel gear set. I also bought a Torsen type B to fit which was all then fitted into the Mini. This took the rpm at 70mph down to 3000. I found this perfect for road use. But, we had done a track day on the short box. The new long ratio box really hurt acceleration and even with the Torsen, it was slower around Cadwell Park.
After a year or so of driving the car I decided I wanted a compromise so built another gearbox to be a mid way version of the 2 giving a cruising rpm of 3600. Another track day down and found this was the happy medium from road to track setup. But I then was asked to do the NC500 in Scotland. I decided I preferred the longer gearing for this trip so altered the gearbox by swapping only gears 3, 4 and 5. The thing is, this time the bellhousing was left bolted to the engine and the box split on the car. The car drove in one Sunday morning and was out again by teatime!
During this time, I used the 16v Mini forum to document all the PG1 swaps. I had people wanting similar things which I helped with. After helping with over 10 of these, I realised there was a market for this type of work. I posted a few on eBay and have now sold over 500 PG1's of all kinds of requests from cheap, check over and simply fix a fault, to Quaife straight cut gear kits and fancy LSD's fitting too costing thousands.
