Forgot to acknowledge B-Maccs comment last time;
The issue is the way the gears connect with each other on the side, i.e. the 'dogs'. The plunger gears and swinging arm gears are different and incompatible in this regard.
and then my observations ;
I have a number of NOS dogs that appear almost swing arm, but have a wider selector fork groove, so have always assumed they are earlier plunger type ??.........
The box I've been using has these in it and I figure they must be Lonstroke and early A10 pre '50, and also;
...........My assumption is that later plunger boxes may have more commonality to swing arm boxes as I recall reading the swing arm boxes included improvements in selection which presumably included the mating faces of the dogs .
I think that 'STD' gears may be the same for Plunger & S/A, but as I don't have any S/A ones, but I do have a RRT2 cluster that I grafted into a Plunger box, and apart from different ratios and widths of at least 'B', the dogs are completely different.
My third gear has been jumping out, so yesterday I had a chance to get into it. Being as I suspect an early(pre '50) box, I was going to change the whole box but would need to do bushes as well, so figured best to just change all the gears rather than just third, also due to differences in the dog arrangement.
All was going ok, swapped the constant mesh gears ('B' & 'G') to my shafts as they fit the bushes, and fitted all in the box, but the mainshaft wouldn't go in.
After some dicking around, I discovered that the selector forks are also a bit different, even thought they have the same numbers.
The early selectors have a 'web', or gusset, which was what was stopping the 'E' gear from meshing to allow the mainshaft to slide in. I guess this is why the early ones have a wider selector groove and narrower gear (but same overall)
The later forks, in addition to lack of gusset are also slightly truncated on their ends.
These are my observations only and so need to be verified as fact...
Now I need to go figure how to reduce the layshaft endfloat from 30+thou and no paper gasket...more
Oh and the first gear thrust washer (67-3203) has a smaller OD on the later box
(~1.088"/~1.173")