New FE build BBM block and heads

[mdross1]

Interesting and the way it should be between a man and his machine. All my builds over the years have received the same love and attention to detail, the end result is always so rewarding in so many ways.
Just walking by the car knowing what is in it how it was assembled the best part ownership. Good Luck with your build.

[jkg2101]

here are some more FE building pics.

Here is the back of the engine, seen from inside the car with mutliple panels removed. note the rear cam plug faces opposite relative to the typical freeze-out plugs on an FE.

[jkg2101]

here is the block plate that goes behind the flywheel. i made sure to have cutouts for the cam plug and the oil galley plugs, although probably dont need them. some say to not make cutouts, so the blocking plate will keep the cam plug from backing out. i guess I would say, that if the cam plug is backing out, we have bigger problems anyway...

[jkg2101]

next I installed the flywheel, and then dialed in the bellhousing. in the future, i would strongly suggest doing this BEFORE the engine is in the car. it sure seems like there is plenty of room to work here, but there is not. The downside to owning a kirkham is that there always seems to be a sharp seam of aluminum waiting to remove some flesh.

the first pic shows the baseline, where mostly I just needed to move the bellhousing up. the numbers are just measurements in thousandths of an inch. the actual value doesnt matter, but they should all be within 5 of each other hopefully. Kirkham has a nice pictorial of this process on their website.

[jkg2101]

so, my original plan was to remove the bellhousing alignment dowels and buy some of the offset ones from RObbMC. well, it turns out these dowels are not so easy to remove. and there really is no way to get good leverage on them inside the car. I got a real nice pliers on one, then twisted it and BAM - the pliers slipped and I left my knuckle skin on one of those aluminum edges.

So, i decided to try the lakewood bellhousing dowel kit, which is what kirkham used on their posting a few years back. Unfortunately, those dowel kits require me to drill a HUGE hole through the bellhousing. The biggest drill bit I have for my press is 1/2" and it looks big. you need something like a 1" drill to make the hole, and the bellhousing is thick steel.

then I would need to hold the bellhousing in the right position while I tighten the nuts, and then weld it up in the car. Doing this with the engine in the car would be a challenge. i'm not sure I have enough knuckle skin to do it. And it would be so awesome if welding splatter got on the polished stainless heat shields too.

So, I came up with plan C. Because I mostly just have to move the bellhousing up in this case, I just enlarged the holes in the bellhousing slightly with my 1/2" drill, and put a bottle jack under the bellhousing before I tightened the bolts. I checked twice to be sure it was repeatable. Then I got good numbers. In the future, I might do what I have done in the past - I might just NOT dial-in the bellhousing. My 69 mustang has had the same toploader for more than 20 years and no trouble there. I wonder if dialing in the bellhousing is overkill for a hobbyist who puts 1000 miles a year on a car.

[blykins]

Bell must be dialed in. No question about it. If I don't do it here, I put it in the build sheet that the bellhousing has to be checked.

There are too many manufacturing tolerances between blocks, cranks, bells, and transmissions.

If you're going to do it your way, then you need to weld washers to the bellhousing so that's there's no slop after you get it positioned where you want it. Things move around a lot and I wouldn't want to rely on clamping force to keep the bell from squirming.

A good way to get the bell dowels out of the block is to weld a nut on the end of them, then use a slide hammer to pull them out.