LB gears up with IF
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• Just five months after its management buy-out Leyland Bus has signed a 12-year collaborative contract with the German gearbox and steering gear manufacturer ZF.
Under the first phase of the deal, Leyland Bus will manufacture components for ZF gearboxes — mainly finished parts and forgings — at the Farington plant, and it will have the right to assemble complete ZF automatic gearboxes under licence for its own use at a later date.
Leyland Bus will now fit the Ecomat (probably the 4HP500 four-speed) as standard on its heavy duty Olympian and Lion double-deck bus chassis. An Ecomat gearbox will also be offered as an option on the Tiger coach chassis, with a ZF automatic — as yet to be announced — as an option on the Royal Tiger Doyen.
Leyland Bus already fits the Ecomat to its Lion doubledecker and Lynx single-decker buses, while a number of Tiger coaches have been supplied to operators for express work with the five-speed Ecomat 5HP500. The six-speed ZF manual gearbox, currently offered by Leyland Bus as an option on Tiger coaches, will still be available.
Production of Leyland's Pneumocyclic and Hydracyclic gearboxes, along with parts for them, will continue for the time being. According to managing director Ian McKinnon, Leyland Bus sees the airoperated Pneumocyclic as a As part of its joint collaborative deal with ZF, Leyland Bus will now fit the Ecomat automatic gearbox as standard on Olympian double-deck chassis.
lower cost and lighter alternative gearbox, but he expects the wider adoption of the Ecomat to lead to the phasing out of the Hydracyclic before the Pneumocyclic boxes.
LB insists, however, that it will still fit its own gearboxes and those of other proprietary manufacturers — namely Voith — if customers ask for them.
Service and parts supply for the Pneumocyclic and Hydracyclic boxes will be unaffected by the joint venture, as will the number of workers now engaged in gearbox production at Farington.
While the deal signals the beginning of the end of Leyland's UK-based original gearbox design and development business, the company says it will "influence on-going technological developments in respect of the gearboxes to be fitted to its products for the future." In practice this is likely to involve its engineers more in gearbox matching than intensive design.
Leyland Bus is spending £800,000 on new machine tools at Farington to help it produce parts for ZF, which claims that the wide availability of the Ecomat to Leyland Bus customers will lead to a 50% increase in the German company's UK sourcing activities — estimated to be worth between £1.72 and £2.4 million a year.