Stumbled on a vintage gear shop in Portland that changed how I look at old transmissions

I was driving through Portland last weekend and saw a sign for 'Rose City Gear Works' tucked behind a hardware store. Walked in and the owner spent 20 minutes showing me a 1968 Muncie M22 rock crusher he had on display. He let me spin the input shaft by hand and you could feel the straight-cut gears clunking with every rotation. Has anyone else run into a shop that had a piece of history just sitting on a shelf like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

paige1665d ago

Oh man, I gotta push back a little here. Those Muncie rock crushers are cool for sure, but they were notorious for being noisy and harsh in daily driving (that whine gets old fast). I’ve seen a few shops that hype them up like rare artifacts, but honestly they’re pretty common if you know where to look.

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spencer_gonzalez15d ago

Ever swapped in a quieter gear set? That whine is real and it drives people nuts on the highway. I dropped a set of Richmond gears in mine and it cleaned up the noise without killing the feel.