Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Success!!

It's been a while, but I haven't been slacking off.
Once I had all the parts in hand, it was a matter of replacing the flywheel ring gear, resurfacing the flywheel again, and building another saginaw 4 speed.

This entails removing the rear shocks, sliding the axle back, then the transmission,clutch and flywheel. The rear shocks were not functional and were severely gummed up with some kind of goo that nothing but lacquer thinner would touch. After two days of soaking in a mixture of lacquer thinner and acetone, I finally got them apart to determine that the housings were worn out. they would have functioned as designed, but would have leaked badly.
I fabricated  some new bolt on mounts and the Monroe Gas-Matics bolted right on.

The ring gear appeared good when I assembled the system (chewed that up). I originally used a new rebuilt clutch set that came with the first motor (I knew better!!) and replaced that with a NEW LUK set this time.
The saginaw is now the single ring unit with 2.54 low, 1.80 second, 1.30 third, and 1.0 fourth, and how sweet it is! Nicely close ratio, and low is a pleasure to drive. I highly recommend this trans with the 4.10 axle ratio and 27" tires.

I rebuilt the single ring Saginaw (1), then rebuilt the 2 ring that I took out (2), sold that one and then built another 2 ring for the same guy out of two cores (3).
This approaches "WORK", bad, very very bad!

Everything works great. I really enjoy it when a plan comes together.

It is impossible to install the 4 piece hood by yourself without an overhead hoist! Yesterday I disassembled the hood and installed the top half today with leather tiedowns. Kinda interesting eyeballing the hood ornament without fans and supercharger pulleys spinning around. We'll try this for  while and see if it is what I want.