Wow, you had it worse than me!!sidecar wrote:I used a JE bellhousing which came with a supplied concentric slave, I though that the slave was from a Transit van but it may well have been from a SAAB. The hose fittings that JE supplied were crap, they leaked sieve! I used my own fittings and it's be OK for 3 years. The position of the slave is very important, when everything is new it needs to be very near the END of its travel when the clutch pedal is pressed, as the friction plate wears the slave piston at-rest location moves further and further up is cylinder. I did get this wrong at first and when I pressed the clutch the piston popped out of its bore!
I ended up spending a load of money getting the bellhousing machined as the spigot bearing did not engage correctly nor did the clutch friction plate splines. From memory I had over 10mm machined from the back of the bellhousing, the back of the bellhousing is 'blind' so the recesses in it needed machining out.
Now if I had one of the thicker RV8 flywheels fitted the clutch spline engagement may have been OK without the machining but the spigot bearing engagement would still have been poor or not at all!
I did consider telling JE all of this but I had already waited 10 months for a set of close ratio gears for a R380 gearbox which then did not fit my gearbox so I had had enough of him. Also he knows everything so he did not need to hear a customer telling him that his bellhousing needed a load of work doing before it can be used!
Maybe people are using it without any machining but the input shaft of their gearbox will be waving about in the breeze due to a lack of support and the splines on the input shaft will only be engaged by about 10mm. (This is about half the available width of the splines on a standard Borg and Beck style of friction plate. My plate has an offset boss which is 30mm thick, I have 29mm of engagement which is nice!)
AJMHO!
I was quite unimpressed with mine but at least it lined up properly.
