ABOUT US

Phil Hoken, a mechanic of 27 years, is the the founder of Retro RV (Kombi Motorhomes, pictured below) and Kombi Keg (Australia’s largest mobile bar franchise network, pictured below) and is also the inventor of the World’s first gear driven, reverse drive kit for the Subaru 4EAT transmission - Reversaru. 

As the saying goes “necessity is the mother of invention’. In this case the necessity was a reverse drive kit for the 4EAT Subaru Automatic transmission to be installed in the Retro RVs. 

The weight of the Retro Rv’s are just under 2 tonne (4400 lbs) and the vast majority of the Retro RV owners wanted Automatic transmissions and the standard VW Autos were becoming harder and harder to find so Phil needed a strong, quiet & reliable solution that would reverse the drive of the Subaru 4EAT automatic transmission so that the Subaru transmissions could be used in the Retro Rvs. Reversaru was born.

The problem was, if you install a standard Subaru automatic transmission into a vehicle with a rear mounted engine, such as a VW Kombi, you would have 4 reverse gears and 1 forward gear! This is due to the fact that the engine and transmission is mounted in the rear of the Kombi / VW Bus, and faces the opposite way to a Subaru. However, if the drive of the transmission is reversed in the Subaru transmission, you have 4 forward gears and one reverse gear! So, in order to utilise the Subaru Transmission in a Kombi / VW Bus, the drive of the transmission had to be 'reversed'. In the Reversaru kit the ‘reverse drive’ is achieved by introducing a 3rd gear (the transfer gear) between the drive gear and the driven gear which reverses the drive of the transmission! 

While the concept of reversing the drive of the transmission ‘easy’, the difficult part was working out how to fit 3 gears into a very tight space within the rear of a 4EAT transmission. This is where Reversaru’s patent pending ‘Transfer Gear Plate’ comes in. After you remove the genuine Subaru gears from the transmission, the Reversaru Transfer Gear Plate is installed which allows a 3rd gear to fit perfectly into the rear of the transmission and the result is; the world's first gear driven, reverse drive kit for the Subaru 4EAT 4 speed Automatic transmission!

Transfer Gear Plate: Patent Pending No. 2023900249 - 251017