Rootes1725cc

Hi everyone been a while since my last post,
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my question is, on my mk1 the reverse gear appears to be on the wrong side i.e you pull the lever right, then down as apposed to pulling the lever left then down, and also every sceptre i have seen seems to have a different gear lever (not the knob!) mine seems very tall/..... have i got a different gearbox or maybe even a whole different gear lever assembly?

Hi Mate,

I have a '65 Mk.1 Sceptre. I bought a second hand gearbox for mine when I first got the car about 7 years ago. I hadn't realised that the reverse gear was on the opposite side to my car. I believe the early cars had no synchromesh on first gear, and the reverse was on the other side to the later ones, so I had bought a gearbox from an early car. For the '64 model there was a few changes to the spec., including a full synchro on all 4 gears, different carb, and minor interior changes. The early gearbox had a flattish round knob, the later one's had a longer slimmer one, not sure about the gear lever being different though.
Incidentally, I swapped gearboxes on mine for a time, and the earlier 'box I had bought worked fine. It was just a little noisy in first gear, although I was told that was normal.

Hope this helps,

Bryan Ellis,

Huddersfield.