This question is coming from a Nodwell person, but there are (some) similarities in the rear ends. Please help my education if you can.
I originally owned an RN110 that was made for the US Army in about 1964. It had a Ford 292 V8 with a Clark 5 speed behind it. It had four axles, the drive sprocket were in the rear and in those days they didn't have front idlers - the track wrapped around the front tire.
When I sold it to a friend to use for hunting, they needed to cover a lot of very rocky ground so he wanted to gear it lower for even slower speeds. What he said he did was get the rear end out of a Thiokol??? Whatever it was, he put it in and it worked fine though it was a slow as could be because it cut the speeds in half.
My Nodwell parts books say the rear end is a #15 and several places in the parts list they refer to Oliver P/Ns. I knew some Thiokols used the OC (Oliver Clark) 15 rear end. I've been told by a lot of Nodwell people the RN110 rear ends are OE15 rear ends. No one can tell me what the "E" stands for. A Bombardier parts person, who dabbled in Nodwell parts, told me the Nodwells had Oliver White 15 rear ends.
So what the friend swapped out, was the same rear end, but with lower gears, and to call it the "pumpkin" was made of aluminum instead of steel. The "pumpkin" is more like a 2' square steel box. They unbolted the axle tubes and planetaries from the Nodwell rear end, bolted them up to the Thiokol rear end and everything worked fine.
Is my information of an OE15 rear end wrong - could it be an OC15 rear end, does such a thing exist? Do Oliver White rear ends exist?
Thanks for any info you can provide.
Bill
trackrig@gmail.com
