[Novanutcase]

You gonna run a meziere water pump and an ATI degreed damper pulley?

John

[scherp69]

Originally Posted by Novanutcase

You gonna run a meziere water pump and an ATI degreed damper pulley?

John

My plans were to run a Vintage Air Frontrunner kit. It comes with a Stewart Hi-performance aluminum water pump and an ATI balancer. I need to confirm that it will fit though with the VVT left on. I see Mast Motorsports has L92 spacers to allow kits to fit with the VVT. They sell VA kits, although they don't advertise the frontrunner kit so hopefully it will work with mine.

[scherp69]

So a little update, a very frustrating one for me, but hopefully someone will learn from my mistake. I started dialing in the scattershield. First I had to buy a dial indicator and a magnetic base. Some write ups I read said you could use a 3" bolt and a c-clamp, but for $18 I thought the magnetic base would be easier. The dial indicator cost me about $20. You can also use a test indicator for this.



I hooked the dial indicator up to the magnetic base and put it on the flywheel to give a good picture of how it looks without the scattershield on.



The scattershield went on and I put the dial indicator back on the flywheel. Here's some pics of how it looks









After posting several questions on another forum, I found out this was not the right way to do it



It needs to be as flat as possible like this



Once the dial indicator was in place, I turned the engine 360 degrees and found the high and low points. My high point was at about 7 o'clock which put my low point around 2 o'clock. Your high point should be almost across from your high point. Once you get your high point and low point numbers, you take the difference and divide by 2. Then you get the off set dowels accordingly. For mine, I needed 0.0021 dowels.

Here's where I made a big mistake. It was recommend that I get some dowels from http://www.robbmcperformance.com/ but I thought "they're all the same and I can just get them in Canada and not have to pay the duty". So I had a pair of Lakewood ones shipped to me. They cost $19 for the dowels and $15 shipping. The Lakewood ones are supposed to turn using a screwdriver......I call bulls$*t. I'll get back to that in a minute.

So I finally got the new dowels



And it was time to take out the old ones. This was quite easy. I took off the exhaust manifolds as they're not being used anyways and used a long bolt. I then tapped them out with a hammer.







Now you want to put some grease on in the dowel holes and on the dowel and tap them in.





Before putting them in, look at them and find out where the high point on the dowel is, for both. You want to have them parallel in the block.

Here's where I was/am getting confused. My high reading was at 7 o'clock and my low was at 2 o'clock. I wasn't sure which way to point the dowels. After watching a video by Keisler, I found you want to point the high side of the dowel towards the biggest number you got with the dial indicator. This is because that number is telling you that it is 0.0035 (for example) away from the center. I think this is correct, but please if someone knows...correct me and help me figure this damn process out. I want to do it right.

So I went to try and turn the dowel with a screwdriver, like it said to do, and I'm not sure who was doing it, but there is no way in hell those things were moving. So I grabbed some vice grips and was able to turn them with those. I kept turning the dowels and remeasuring but ended up no farther ahead. The annoying thing is everytime you need to turn the dowels, you have to loosen all the bolts holding the scattershield, turn the dowels and then tighten them back up. On the passenger side I had no problem fitting the vice grips but on the driver's side, I had to cut out the mechanical linkage bracket. Good thing I'm going hydraulic.

Before



After. I'm going to grind it down smooth and put some red paint on to clean it up.



That last picture gave a glimpse as to why not to use the 'screwdriver type' of dowels. You can only clamp them so many times before they end up looking like this





So basically I wasted $40 on dowels when I was told to get the good ones to start with. Take my advice....get the good ones to start with!!!

Yesterday I called RobbMC Performance and they will ship me a new set on Monday. The new dowels run $28 and the thing that pi****es me off...I paid $15 to have the first ones shipped from a place that is 3 hours away. RobbMC is charging $10 to be shipped from Nevada. The difference between the good ones and the Lakewood ones are that once they are in place, you can use a open end wrench to turn them. They also have a screw down the middle that allows you to loosen the dowels so they turn. Once in final place, you tighten the screw and they are locked in place. Here's a link to the good ones: http://www.robbmcperformance.com/products/dowels.html

Another thing I found during all the trial and error runs was that my magnetic base was not sitting completely flat on the flywheel. I could lightly touch the shaft on it and it would rock. I found out why. When it was sitting on the flywheel, the lip on the crank that comes through the flywheel (hopefully that makes sense) sits slightly higher, causing there to be a ridge. Also, the magnetic base would not sit flat between the two bolts as it was a little bit two wide. Nothing a grinder can't fix.



So today I am no farther ahead, but actually down $40 and a few frustrating hours. Hopefully next week I will get a chance to put the new dowels in and get this done once and for all. I just hope that I have all the kinks worked out and it goes smoothly.

Please if anyone has any suggestions or advice on dialing in the scattershield, please feel free to join in. I want this to be as informative as possible for anyone reading this.

[scherp69]

Today was a good day. I got the new RobbMC dowels on Monday and really wanted to take another shot at getting the scatter shield dialed in so thought I would try it today. If you wondering what the big deal is about the RobbMC dowels, there is a huge difference between them and the Lakewood ones. You'll see in the pics. I was able to get it dialed in....and on the first try I got it to 0.0035" As the minimum recommended is 0.005", I wasn't going to play around with it any more. Onto the pics.

The new RobbMC dowels. They are .021. You can vaguely see a flat spot on the top of them. That is so you can use a 9/16 open end wrench to turn them while in the block instead of a flat screw driver which does not work.





Here's the two side by side. Huge difference



Here's the old one's sticking through the scatter shield. No wonder they got chewed up



And the new ones



Now that I ground down the sides if the magnetic base for the dial indicator, it sat on the flywheel completely flat and there was no movement. A huge must for doing this.







Now that the dial indicator was in place, it was time to get my readings. This time I decided to get only the 12, 3, 6 and 9 o'clock readings. Last time I was writing them down on pieces of paper and trying to remember which was which or I had a bunch of pieces of paper going with a ton of diagrams. Here's a very easy way to keep track of your measurements. Get a dry erase marker and write it on the face. When you need to repeat, wipe off the marks and start over. Here's my readings.



With these readings I was so happy. I tightened the screws in the dowels and set them in place.





Not sure if I'll get it done today or not, but I plan on doing a new thread showing how to dial in the scatter shield will a bunch of pics.

[scherp69]

Now that that was done...it was time to measure the clutch.

I didn't take a bunch of pics of this process as I know there are quite a few threads out there, but here's the engine with the Monster on





I took the measurements and found the following: The difference between the end of the clutch fingers and the face of the scatter shield was 3 1/8". The difference between the face of the trans and the top of the throwout bearing when it was fully compressed was 2 3/8" giving me a difference of 3/4". According to the instructions from Keisler, the ideal difference would be 1/4", so it looks like I need 1/2" shims. I've pm'd Shafi at Keisler as I'm not sure if these are shims or not. They were included in the kit. They seem to be shims, but have no threaded holes to mount the throwout bearings. Anyone know if these are shims as they are 1/2" thick together, and that's exactly what I need.

[ArenaSwe]

I also used the RobbMC dowels! Really nice, and fast shipping too. Dowels is definitely not a place to go for the cheap stuff, could save a lot of head ache.

Project is looking nice!

[SHIFTY4]

i used the RobbMC dowels too... they're the best. at www.JollyRodder.com i have the dowls linked along with a great tech article on how to properly dial in a bell housing along with other info of possible interest.

yes, it CAN be a royal PITA to dial it all in but in the end it'll be worth it.

sorry ya had so many headaches, i wish ya the best... still one of the best projects i've seen