308 V12 conversion begins

I think all I made last week were mistakes. I realized last night that the distance from the crank to the trans shaft was .010" under the stock dimension.....no good, the gears will never fit like that. So tonight I re-bored the pin holes in the trans in the correct spot and made a set of step pins (one end for the now oversize trans holes and the other end to fit the engine) to set the distance to the correct number. Tomorrow night I'll weld in the holes on the back of the bellhousing that I just welded and cut yesterday and do it again to the new numbers.....and be back to where I thought I was yesterday.

I really need to learn to be more careful, I guess that will be my self improvement goal for the year........of course if I was more careful last year I would have known better than to start this project to begin with
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Definition:
Tenacious {ten-A-sheeee-oooos!}(Adj) 1.) Unyeilding regardless of obstacles. 2.) obsessed with correct fabrication to the point of self abuse. 3.) Mark Eberhardt

 

Here's some more self abuse.

I welded up the the holes that need to move tonight. I think I'll wait until tomorrow to start cutting, the housing will be cool and hopefully I'll be in a better mood......
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Do you also have that thing where your projects either wants to be going well or wants to self-destruct? That's at least how my projects go. Either I am on a roll and everything I do goes right and is easy to do, or everything I do comes out crooked. Nothing much in between. On the latter days it's best to simply close the door to the shop and do something constructive, like play with the dog (or the girlfriend ).

 

Mark,

FYI you cant really hurt aluminum by dunking it in cold water immediately after welding on it. In fact it's a good idea to do so as it will leave it slightly heat treated. Unlike steel, it wont get brittle and crack. When welding on 6061 (or any aluminum) the weld area ends up more like 3xxx series (pretty soft). By dunking the smoking hot part in a bucket of water, you can increase the hardness to resemble a 4xxx/5xxx type. BTW, I learned this from Smokey Yunick.

Cheers,
Paul

 

yup........

 

That sounds about right to me. It has to be up at 800F or so when you quench it to do any heat treating I think (I'd have to look up the exact number) and you are more likely to get distortion of the part. I do often cool the parts when I actually want to move on to the next step, last night I just wanted to go to bed at a reasonable hour for a change

 

I'm just heading down to the shop now, but in the mean time you guys might want to take a look at this thread:

http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/showthread.php?p=138340628#post138340628

Wil (of very nicely supercharged 2v 308 fame as well as very helpful with my project, he just sent me a couple TBs to mess with) has decided to build a car.....from scratch (mostly) it's looking pretty darn good.

 

The trans bearing bore is done….again. Anyone else getting déjà vu here???

It is a pain in the butt to get this housing indicated straight……I thought I’d only have to do it once. I think I’m going to mill the bottom edge straight so I’ll have something easy to indicate on….just in case, and it will make the holes on the back go much faster tomorrow.
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Yes. He was ahead of schedule on his drive out to york so he popped in last night for a visit. We "known" eachother for 6 or 8 years now so it was good to finally meet him.

 

That's great to hear.

I hope he took some pictures. I want to see what goes on in that "shop" of your.

 

OMG!, i cant beleive i just went throw alllll the pages..... and all i can say is...... THANK U!!!!!!!!

 

He did. As soon as I said shop, he ran out to the car for his camera so he'd have proof

 

That must have taken hours!

I was talking to another guy about maybe reorganizing everything in this thread in like a DB similar to fchat so you could look in order or by topic to make it possible to find stuff.......in my spare time I guess.

 

Well ill be honest with you..... WELL WORTH IT!! TIME WELL SPENT.. I EVEN GOT MY CO-WORKER TO STOP WHAT HE WAS DOING TO READ THIS THREAD!!!

 

Things are looking better today. All the holes seem to be in the right spots and the drop gears seem to fit right....that's a good thing.

I took a little time to rough the bellhousing shap in tonight so it matches the engine now. The plan is to cut the front the side a little too, I'm thinking leave it full thichness at the 4 big bolt holes and thin it 1/4"-3/8" everywhere else.
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Say, that's starting to look like an engine and transmission.

 

Mark - Were you going to finish the rough welds on the bellhousing flange and filler pieces? I was just wondering if in doing so that it might alter the residual stresses in the piece and cause its shape to change enough to affect the gear alignment.

Gary

 

I was thinking the same thing.

 

+2
Ciao,
George

 

Yes I am going to finish everything.....and yes there is a chance that something may move a little. It's one of those catch 22 things. I can't finish anything until I locate the major stuff, but once I locate everything the finishing work could move them. Normally if the rough cuts are taking less than .100" on something this size there is no problem so I think it will be fine. I guess the other option would have been to cut the locating holes undersize a litte, finish the rest of the housing then come back and finish cut the important stuff.

 

Today's poject is to clean up the bell housing a bit more. I decided an real diameter would look better than the rough scriberd to the engine diameter I did yesterday and I needed to set up the rotary table anyway to cut the flange so.....it now has a diameter. I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing with the bottom 1/2 yet, but for now I guess that will get the same diameter as the top. Tonight after little one goes to bed I should have time to cut the outside of the flange and maybe start grinding/sanding, and this housing will start to look like a proper housing.

You might notice it really doesn't fit very well on the rotary table being the part is about 14" acorss and it's an 8 inch rotary table. Also becasue of the shape of the part I had to quite a bit spacer under the part.....but it seems to be working.
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Very pretty!

 

I didn't get as much time as I'd hoped and things are going slower than I'd hoped, but I'm getting there. Tomorrow maybe.
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It's looking good Mark! You must be taking some really light cuts with that set-up though.