my thinking exactly neil....i think i will just mod the newer shaft to fit my gearbox...sounds simpler to me than starting fresh.
gear class neil.....
the cogs we use on these cars are called an involute gear. dont mean to sound patronizing but im gonna educate you guys

to form a gear the teeth need to roll against each other (this im sure you allready know) so the teeth are shaped accordingly. if they where to scrape each other the gear would wear out in hours.
correct tooth form is made up of 2 arc's--- epicycloid ( the upper half of the tooth) and hypocycloid (the lower half of the tooth).
these two arcs are formed by rolling a smaller circle around the p.c.d of the gear where the line is a fixed point of the rolling circle, so as the circle rolls, an inner and outer arc would be formed. inner arc is lower tooth profile and outer arc is upper tooth profile.
the p.c.d of a gear is half the tooth height...or really the line of the 2 circles of the gear that touch (reffers to when drawing out a gear set. before the gears are drawn they start out as 2 base circles that touch, but the teeth will end up being longer to engage with each other)
epicycloid the circle rolls around the outside, and the hypocycloid rolls around the inside.
this will form a cycliodal gear tooth.
this is a very complex task...then transfer that to shape the cutter and away you go. well no not really, the cycliodal gear is very touchy about where it touches the other gear

if the gear centres are off or move due to bearing wear the teeth will fail very fast.
so with that under our belt..i hope your still with me

....
a very clever guy came up with a new idea...involute tooth form

the reason this is so good is 2 factors...
1. involute tooth is formed of only 1 arc, imagine a string with a pen on the end unwinding off a drum, as i unwinds it forms a single arc with a constant changing angle. so tooth forming and cutter shaping is much simpler.
2. involute gears are not so fussed if the centers are off...it makes no more friction from being .20mm off than being dead on centre.
pressure angle...this is the line of contact as the teeth roll over each other.
typically 20 degrees for an involute tooth form...no other angle has ever been used in industry except some old lathe change gears used to be cut at 14.5 degrees. changing the pressure angle changes the shape of the tooth...so different pressure angles could not be used together.
D.P...this means diametral pitch, the number of teeth per inch diameter of a gear
module..this is a metric way of quoting the size of the teeth or the pitch diameter in millimeters divided by the number of teeth.
so D.P is imperial and module is metric. a mod 1 gear is 25.4 D.P...mod 2 is 12.7 D.P so there is a tiny error there. this would cause excessive wear if a mod and a D.P gear are used together.
on a .8 mod i think the error is around .300inch / .75mm
not a great difference but approaching 1mm...
gear class over guys...i hope i explained this well.
phew...

chris