[Matt Monson]

Hello,

First off, I do want to be honest on one thing. We are still making our gears in Australia. Paul Guard stopped cutting gears with Albins 5 or 6 years ago. I had Albins cutting gears for my old company as recently as 18 months ago. While I am patently against negative selling and cutting down another company's product, I will go on the record as saying that I do consider our current gear cutter to be making the best Porsche gears in the world and there are some significant design differences and production protocols that make that the case. If there weren't Paul wouldn't have made the change in factories.

As for proprietary information? I can share some of that stuff with you. Our 915 gears are made from a vacuum processed 9310 steel to an AGMA (American Gear Manufacturer's Association) rating of 9. Most other gear products on the market are rated between 5 and 7. Our GT3 and Cup Car gears carry a rating of 11.

The actual heat treating process is one of those proprietary things that is closely guarded. Believe it or not, but our gears, Albins gears, and Holinger gears (including Porsche Motorsports stuff) are all treated in the same facility. When I toured the facility last year, the owner explained to me that each company had it's own recipe that he followed based on the input he was given from each gearcutter. He was very proud of the fact that he was like a vault and would never disclose Holinger's process to my guy, or the other way around. I personally don't even know the details of our exact process. I just know that the depth to which our hardening goes is unmatched by the competition.

All of our gears are shot peened after hardening. We do believe in this process. They are also reground after hardening. Not everyone does that. It's part of why certain gear companies have gears that are noisier than others (but not all of it. Part of it is tooth profile as well). Straight cut gears will always be noisier than helical gears.

I personally don't believe in cryo treating gears. It's a waste of money.

I do believe in REM finishing, but on gears like ours that are reground after hardening, there aren't substantial gains to be had. On OEM gears and some of the other aftermarket offerings, it makes a huge difference. On all of our pro-level LSDs we REM the center gears; both spiders and side gears. Inside the differential, where there's a lot of friction generated heat, making the gears run smoother and lower friction is something we think has merit. So we REM those parts.

We have recently started making straight cut 915 gears. They are stronger than helical. Currently they are only offered in 2nd and 3rd gears in low ratios where we've seen strength issues in the past. Ratios like 1.63 (19:31) and 1.60 (20:32) we are making straight cut. A stock 1.26 is something we'll likely never do that for. There's just no demand for it. But the rally guys, who run those short thirds do break gears, often in the way Steve describes with a jump or a bump. In Europe there's a lot of vintage guys starting to run our straight 2nd and 3rd gears in historic rally.

I hope that satisfies your inner geek a little bit. If you want more, you should shoot me an email and we can chat offline so we don't sidetrack this thread too far into the weeds. I like to try to respect the sanctity of the original poster and his needs.

Regards,

Matt