ABOUT US
Our MISSION is to manufacture, to the highest quality standard,
superior well-proven products that give years of reliable service.
ROVERDRIVE GEAR CORPORATION is an employee-owned company registered in British Columbia, Canada. Our office and manufacturing facility is at 3396 Marine Drive in West Vancouver, in a five-story wooden building that is a heritage landmark. All research and development of our products is done on these premises where we have a well-equipped machine shop and assembly area. We are a couple hours drive from one of the finest wilderness test areas, British Columbia's Coast Mountains.
In addition to the manufacture of ROVERDRIVE Land Rover overdrives, we are involved in the design and manufacture of products for off-road vehicles, yachts and small commercial ships. Our founder, R.A. Ray Wood, has numerous international mechanical patents in these fields.
In total, our team owns five Land Rovers ranging in years from 1968 to 2003. We have a very active Land Rover overdrive evaluation program. Besides having ROVERDRIVE Land Rover overdrives fitted on our daily driving vehicles, our expedition team has covered 25,000 miles in Europe, America, Australia and Africa over the past five years using ROVERDRIVE Land Rover overdrives on a variety of different Land Rovers.
HISTORY - DEVELOPMENT OF THE ROVERDRIVE LAND ROVER OVERDRIVE
For many years we owned the leading Land Rover spare parts supply company in Canada and were distributors of both the English ‘Fairey’ and Spanish ‘Santana’ overdrives throughout North America.
When these overdrives were discontinued we decided to build our own brand of overdrive. Our experience with the obsolete units gave us strong opinions on how a Land Rover overdrive should be designed. We had the engineering expertise and we had a well-equipped machine shop.
We started with the premise that an overdrive should be quiet running. This meant discarding the crude ‘back gear’ designs used in the past. With memories of a quiet running Laycock overdrive in a long dismantled Sunbeam Rapier, we opted for an epicyclical gear train.
We then researched North American made automatic transmissions and found that the epicyclical components of the General Motors Turbo 400 transmission could be modified to fit inside the bolt circle used to mount a Land Rover overdrive. The Turbo 400 is generally accepted to be the strongest automatic transmission ever made. We wanted our overdrive strong. We wanted it capable of handling the torque of any Land Rover engine used in any gear in high or low range. With components from the Turbo 400 we succeeded.
As 110 Defenders were uncommon in America, the early prototypes of the Defender ROVERDRIVE were tested in a Discovery, seen here in Australia's Gibson Dessert, 600 miles west of Alice Springs.
The obsolete overdrives suffered from lubrication problems so we determined that the best way to lubricate our new overdrive was by circulating oil from the adjoining transfer case. This concept worked brilliantly in our first prototype. No longer would overdrive owners constantly have to worry about oil levels and put up with oil leaking from breathers. The shape of the new overdrive could be slimmed down to a simple compact cone that did not interfere with exhaust pipes and other equipment on the Land Rover.
We looked at other weaknesses of the older designs too. The input couplings were prone to wear out and leave one stranded so we made ours much stronger and better lubricated. The needle roller thrust bearings could break and destroy the aluminum housings so we opted for rugged simple deep groove ball bearings – virtually indestructible and cheap to replace. Instead of exotic syncromesh clutches we raided the Land Rover parts bin and used standard Land Rover syncromesh units that are obtainable everywhere.
We rejected the idea of using an electro/hydraulic shifter on our new design. We intended our overdrive to be capable of going anywhere with the utmost reliability.
The result of our work is the ROVERDRIVE Land Rover overdrive. Strong, quiet, compact and requiring virtually no maintenance. The British Intellectual Property Office awarded us a patent that looks nice on a wall in the office.