[Xack]

I was searching for some insight on the Lakewood bellhousing and experience of others trimming it, and I found this old posting. Also, I am looking to see if anyone has a similar frame and any problems removing it from the engine while on the frame.

When I put my BBF and tranny together, I had to trim my Lakewood somewhat around the starter in order to get it into the frame. At this point I had not considered how it hung on the frame as I was going by the manufacturers notes.

Alignment:
I have had a similar problem when installing my Lakewood bellhousing. Lakewood makes a nice scatter shield, but it needs work out-of-the-box. It was impossible to center the transmission as the hole is way too big. And the hole is not round. After some time measuring and remeasuring I went around the thing taking points of data. It had 3 major places where the radius was out of round. If you measure at different points each time you try to take distance measurements you'll go blind, or mad, or both.

I sent it to a machine shop to weld it up to "snug fit" my Tremec TKO spacer bracket. They locked it down to the CNC machine base, found what was the best "center" of the hole by the CNC measurements and then attached and machined a small reference hole in a bar bolted diagonally across 2 of the mount holes. This is for alignment later only. They welded up the hole in order to provide enough material to remove and machine the hole to proper size.

Needless to say alignment was a first time breeze. The hole was round and it did not matter anywhere on the housing where I took measurements, all data points measured by the dial guage were within .004". The transmission fits in the bellhousing like a glove.

Now, about this business of warping. The points where the bellhousing mounted to the engine block are where the stress will be. The bottom bolt holes do nothing except hold the foreward scatter plate in position. That's all.

If you grind the bellhousing warping shouldn't be an issue. If you heat it up in order to remove metal, then you'll probably want to check alignment again. However, in that area, warping should not affect anything unless the whole scatter shield is warped across the transmission mount hole. You should check to see that the bellhousing still fits the block. If there is not a problem and the bolts tighten the shield flat against the block, your back in business.

Warping will be your biggest problem. Warping of the relationship from the engine to the transmission shaft will cause all kinds of transmission wear and shifting problems. However, the installation I have is well within misalignment numbers. And if I keep the engine revs down to say 3K, there should not be much a problem. If you get yours machined, just check the transmission deck to see if it's flat against the engine block mount deck. That's easily done on a CNC.

If you have a Lakewood, you'll probably have alignment problems unless your lucky. If I had to do it again, I'd look for another bellhousing manufacturer and also check dimensions and roundness of the transmission coupling FIRST.

Xack