Vibration signals acquired from a gearbox usually are complex, and it is difficult to detect the symptoms of an inherent fault in a gearbox. In this paper, an adaptive redundant lifting scheme for the fault diagnosis of gearboxes is developed. It adopts data-based optimisation algorithm to lock on to the dominant structure of the signal, and well reveal the transient components of the vibration signal in time domain. Both lifting scheme and adaptive redundant lifting scheme are applied to analyse the experimental signal from a gearbox with wear fault and the practical vibration signal from a large air compressor. The results confirm that adaptive redundant lifting scheme is quite effective in extracting impulse and modulation feature components from the complex background.