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Pete Jackson Gear Drives

3K views 6 replies 5 participants last post by  camaroman7d 
#1 ·
I'm thinking of getting a Pete Jackson "noisy" gear drive for my Chevy 350 and wanted to ask everyone's opinion on them.

Do you like them?
How noisy are they?
Will they fit without machining?
 
#2 ·
gear drives

Canadian Charlie said:
I'm thinking of getting a Pete Jackson "noisy" gear drive for my Chevy 350 and wanted to ask everyone's opinion on them.

Do you like them?
How noisy are they?
Will they fit without machining?
no.......

loud.............

no...............

IMO if you have your heart set on a gear drive i would go with a single idler gear type.... The one where the idler gear is mounted in the cover.....

Keith
 
#4 ·
You do not have to "machine" anything. You do have to set up the end play on the idlers. A bench grinder is plenty good enough to do that.

I have run them in several engines, not hard to set up at all. You do need to get the clearances right.

Do a search on "gear drive" and you will find more information than you want.

You will also find two typical thoughts/feeling either love or hate. not many in the middle. I am one of the few in the middle. they are fine on some cars and I wouldn't recommend them on some others. An average RPM street car should be fine, a high RPM engine I would suggest something other than a PJ gear drive. This is just my opinion.

I would not recommend the NOISEY one on any car period, they are just to overwhelming and take away from the sound of the engine. The quiet makes anough noise to hear without being too much.


Royce
 
#5 ·
gear drives

Yea it is personal issue for sure.....

The only thing i can say bad about them from my own experience is.I worked at a shop part time for awhile and we had a few in street rod engines... We had a problem with the higher mileage engines 35,000 and up where they would stretch the cross bar in the idler gears. I guess this is what turned me off to them in any typ of street engine.

I probably should have given a better answer to the machine question, Royce is correct you can do all the fitting with hand tools and a grinder....

Keith
 
#6 ·
just to go to bat for the gear drives again...

i had an old Erson single idler solid aluminum cover unit in my first car... sounded pretty fantastic, but I was young and highly impressionable. it's just something different to do that really turns heads.

now i've just built an engine from the ground up, and included an Erson single idler to take me "back to the day" and it is definitely a noticable sound.

the amount of work involved in setting one up is another issue. be prepared to pull your hair out. setting gear lash, camshaft end play with shims on the cam button, etc. etc. in some cases you have to drill into the block in order to adjust the cam cover locating pins. talk about a major PITA.

if you have more questions about Erson single idlers, PM me. they're available sometimes on ebay. and of course there's the milodon units which cost about 2x as much.

cheers

the blonde weasel
 
#7 ·
blndweasel made me think of one other thing. I would ONLY run a gear drive behind an aluminum cover. Stamped covers like to bend and flex too much. This could be part of the problem you ran into Keith.

Royce
 
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