Back from Hiatus

So, last week I did more work on my hot rod in three hours than I have in the last three years.

I have an old-timer friend who lives down the street whom I knew before moving to this neighborhood.  He and began working on Fords in 1939 at the tender age of 13 for $0.25 an hour.  After the war, he eventually went on to graduate from the Ford dealership shop to the sales floor and went out as a sales manager.  After some time away, he returned to working on his and other folks’ early Fords (flathead V-8s and earlier) and other old cars.

I met him years ago through the local Early Ford V-8 Club when he helped me disassemble a banjo ring and pinion.  But, when I moved into the neighborhood, he wasn’t working on cars at all.  Fast forward to now, when he has returned to working on them and wants to help me with my car.

So, we recently began scheduling weekly car nights (he’s helping me to actually honor car nights that have been in my calendar for years, but sporadically observed) starting with my learning how to use the K.R. Wilson Timing Fixture he recently gave me.  While that session was a bust because the diving bell distributor I brought had a broken base, we decided to meet regularly and the most recent session was last night in my garage, taking a look at the clutch.

For whatever reason, most likely his insistence that a smoothly operating clutch is a must, my friend has for some time been concerned about whether or not my clutch was set up correctly.  For the record, I have a 9-1/2” clutch and pressure plate that apparently came standard in 1949-53 Ford and 1951-53 Mercury cars.  

Even before last week's discovery (I’m getting ahead of myself here), this set-up has been a problem: the thickness of the flywheel and/or ring gear caused me to have to trim down the thickness of the starter end plate to enable the Bendix drive to disengage upon starting (I have yet to reassemble the starter after that problem for several reasons).

So, last week we started out by trying to test how smoothly the clutch would release by installing a clutch release arm to the shaft and testing it with a piece of pipe or pipe wrench, since I don’t have my brake and clutch pedals connected yet.  First, we began by filing and fitting the three different clutch release arms I have in my stash to see which would line up best with the pedal arm and not be prevented from releasing by interference with the transmission bellhousing.  We settled on this one:

However, once we installed it with a drift punch through the pin hole and used a pipe wrench on the drift to release the clutch did we discover we couldn’t get the arm to move beyond pushing the throwout bearing forward to the pressure plate fingers.  It turns out they are jammed in place, and can’t move forward.  In fact, it appears that the clutch is already partly released by virtue of where the arms are jammed.

Sorry, no picture (yet)

It appears that the pressure plate fingers have too small of an open diameter between them because the 1949-later input shafts are much smaller than the 1948-earlier transmissions, so my larger input shaft is jamming forward the fingers of the pressure plate.

To further diagnose the problem, I’m going to have to spin the car 180* in the garage (which requires cleaning up the garage floor first) and pulling the motor to get to the transmission and pressure plate.  The likely solution: change out the 9-1/2” pressure plate and clutch for the even lighter 9” pressure plate and clutch (that came in 1935-40 Fords) my friend’s been recommending all along.  This, in turn, would require redrilling the flywheel or getting another flywheel.  Sigh.

If it was easy, everyone would build a hot rod.

I’m hoping to get the garage, car, and motor ready to pull out my next Thursday garage night.  We’ll see...

-30-