Liberty’s Gears to Shift Your Own Gears with High Horsepower

TREMEC Elite Distributor Liberty’s Gears has been in the business of beefing-up manual transmissions since the days of bell-bottoms and mutton-chop sideburns. Today, Liberty’s Gears is a source for racers and enthusiasts wanting to shift their own gears behind ultra-high-horsepower engines.

Liberty’s Gears was started in 1971 by Joseph Liberty Jr. His career began in GM’s Cadillac division and in his spare time he was a successful drag racer. Experiments in developing improvements to manual transmissions for increased strength and quicker shifts earned him a solid reputation among racers across the country. Eventually he stopped racing and focused entirely on the manual transmission business, building Liberty’s Gears into an international supplier of upgraded manual transmissions and manual transmission parts.

Liberty’s Gears offers TREMEC transmissions to suit a variety of applications, including drag racing and road racing, in addition to street use. Since there are numerous variables between applications (even within the same performance sect), Liberty’s Gears first gathers vehicle specs and information from the customer on how the vehicle will be used. Then they pull a new TREMEC unit from the shelf and start modifying it accordingly.

Horsepower and torque are not the only factors for upgrades, but also the shifting environment and pattern. A drag racer will only shift down through the gears during a normal pass, but road racing requires upshifting and downshifting countless times. Each situation puts different stresses on the transmission itself.

As technology, manufacturing and metallurgy progressed, Liberty’s Gears updated its processes for upgrading select internals of TREMEC transmissions for extreme use to include methods like cryogenic-dipping and shot-peening for extra strength and durability. Craig Liberty from Liberty’s Gears took some time to explain these to us, which we detail in the photos and captions that follow.