"Keith J Chesworth" wrote in message
s.com...
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 09:10:04 +0100, Martin Rich
wrote:

Different times, different conditions. I loved my first Car, a Morris
Oxford Series 2, 1956, with column gear change (they are in there
somewhere, trick is finding them!!). Magnificent wagon all round. But
today I would be rather scared about the thought of taking one out on
the open road and trying to drive it to suit todays conditions.

Why was there a trend for column gear change in the late 50s and early 60s?
Previously, cars had had the gear lever on the floor, hadn't they, and they
soon went back to that afterwards. Shortly after passing my test, I remember
trying to get the hang of a friend's old Renault 16 (one of the last cars, I
think, to have a column gear change) and failing miserably: I think the
secret was that you needed to be very slow and deliberate, rather than going
straight from one gear to the next as you would with a normal gear lever,
because the linkage felt very springy as if there was a lot of slack and
springiness in the cables that actuated it.

Interesting also that in the early 60s (eg Mark 1 Cortina and Mark 2 Anglia)
they went in for very long gear levers, with the pivot point somewhere under
the dashboard. The amount of travel on the gear level knob must have been
tremendous - or else there was very little angular movement at the pivot. By
comparison, I can remember how revolutionary the Viva seemed with its tiny
gear lever only about four inches long, pivoted so much further back where
gear levers are now. Similarly you had cars like the Hillman Hunter which
had the 3-foot-long handbrake on the right hand side, between the driver's
seat and the door. All this was *long* before I was old enough to drive, so
they were just academic curiosities - I never got chance to try any of them.

I learned on my mum's Renault 6 which had a gear lever like a hockey stick
coming out horizontally from the dashboard. It looked weird but it was
actually very easy and intuitive. It was an incredibly Heath-Robinson
linkage: the rod ran over the engine to a gearbox between the engine and the
radiator with a conventional gear lever sticking out of it. As you moved the
gear stick, a fork-and-grommet arrangement moved the lever on the gearbox.
It was very prone to disengaging: once when I'd reversed into a gateway, the
linkage came off and the gear stick flopped upside down as soon as I took my
hand off it. I've never been allowed to forget that I unwittingly uttered
the question "Dad, is it *supposed* to do that?"!

I drove a new Honda Civic the other day - the one with the gear lever on the
dashboard. Again, it looks odd but is fairly easy - my only criticism is
that there isn't very much side-to-side movement when going from second to
third or fourth to fifth - I tended to miss 3rd/4th and unwittingly go
straight from 2nd to 5th or vice-versa till I got used to it.

Strange how you get used to little refinements, and really miss them when
they're not there. When I went for a test drive on a skidpan a few years
ago, the car I drove was an old Escort. And the gear lever didn't have any
springs to bias it into the 3rd/4th plane, as you get on all (?) cars
nowadays. You get used to the gear lever find its own way from 2nd to 3rd,
with a definite spring to prevent it overshooting to 5th and vice versa -
without it, I found it very difficult to judge where 3rd was: either I
didn't move the lever across enough and hit 1st or else I overshot and the
lever got stuck as it went to the place where 5th would be nowadays.