Royal Enfield Bullet by Peter Henshaw

Author:Peter Henshaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crowood

The new five-speed box was a masterpiece, giving a better spread of ratios and a far better gearchange.

STUART MCGUIGAN

By now our name was mud, and we were told we should have used a cam drum because the Japanese used that so it must be the best. Fortunately a new head of development, Krishnan, had been appointed. He came over to the UK and we were able to convince him that a camplate was fine as long as it was made as per the drawings. Unlike a lot of people at Enfield who were afraid to rattle the cages upstairs, he was prepared to argue our case. So we started again with new tooling, and in the end it was all fine – they’ve never had a problem with it since.

At the same time, the clutch was updated with a ball and ramp mechanism, while lubrication was by EP90 oil, which needed changing every 7,500 miles (12,000km) – the old box, unique among gearboxes by then, used grease. Finally, six prototypes were built, five built into bikes in India and one taken back to England for road testing there. After 18,600 miles (30,000km) on the road, the boxes were dismantled, measured, minor changes made, and another thirty pre-production units assembled. More testing followed before they were finally released for production.

Unfortunately, all of this took time. McGuigan and Crocker started work on the gearbox project in 1995, with production scheduled for 1997, but in the event it only finally went live in April 2002 for the home market, with export machines following at the end of the year. For export customers, the five-speed left-foot shift was an instant hit, and within six months the new Sixty-5 (see below) was making up 80 per cent of UK sales, the five-speed box soon becoming standard on all export bikes. It’s worth remembering that by this time, most Bullet buyers in Europe had grown up with Japanese bikes, so a left-foot shift was quite normal.

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