The
death has been announced of Forbes Perry, managing director of Perbury Engineering
Ltd.
He died on 20 December and the funeral is being held at
Banbury Crematorium on 8 January 2014 at 3pm.
Forbes will be best remembered for the pioneering work
he undertook on continuously variable transmissions – traction drive
transmissions which rely on the special friction characteristics of
elastohydrodynamic fluids in the interface between two meeting surfaces
carrying torque.
Most notably he invented the Perbury Transmission, the
precursor of the present-day Torotrak IVT toroidal traction drive transmission.
Forbes worked closely with British Leyland and the NRDC
– National Research & Development Corporation, now BTG (British Technology
Group) which spun off its Torotrak interests many years ago.
Early development of the Perbury was detailed by Peter
Stubbs of BL Technology, Gaydon, Oxfordshire, in March 1982 in a paper Development of the Perbury Traction
transmission. The aim then was to use the device in a British Leyland passenger
car as a fuel saving device.
The unit was used also in a Leyland bus following development
of commercial vehicle transmissions by British Leyland at Leyland, Lancashire –
hence the present location for Torotrak plc which itself was spun out of
Leyland Vehicles Ltd.
And even to the end he was working on new types of
transmissions for small cars.
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