What brand or place to buy Cam degree wheel works well for a early 308?
Are you planning to use it with the engine in the car or on a bench? With the engine installed, there are size limitations. The bigger the wheel, the more accurate you will be. Either case, check out summitracing.com.
I bought a large wheel from NAPA, but its virtually impossible to use in the car as mentioned. There are various sites detailing degree wheeling as well as making your own wheels. In the end I saved one to my doc's off the net and copied it, scaling it to as large a size as would clear with it placed against the crank snout. Then I cut one from thin aluminum sheet, and transfered marks onto it with a scribe. It wasnt as hard as it sounds, took maybe half an hour at most. Sometime I'll make a better one out of heavier material and take more time to make it pretty, but it did what I wanted at the time. Also remember that while the crankshaft turns clockwise as you look at the engine, simular to most engines round the world as well as most degree wheels, the 308 cams rotate counter clockwise. You have to either black out the before and after references on your wheel or reverse the words all together, or youll be pulling your hair out. Its bad enough trying to keep it all in your head without a backwards degreewheel helping to confuse you. And while its true that a bigger wheel can be more accurate, the degree tics on a 10 inch wheel are over 1/16th inch, more than enough to achieve great accuracy if everything else you do is reasonable. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Paul, Does this imply that you've found that 10" OD is the max usable size with the engine in the car? I've been wondering, since my 11" Summit wheel is too big. Comp Cams & Proform both make 9" wheels, & MR Gasket a 7" wheel. Only 10" wheel I know of is the JOMAR 10" wheel, Nice, but pricy at at £39.00.
I 've got the 7 inch wheel from mr gasket for $26.00 with bushings. Will this work??? Bought it to verify my work truck cam set up. parking in the blue spaces, chris
I was way off. Its actually 5 3/4" in diameter, which IIRC I made it that size because thats the size that came off the printer. The next one I'll make so it just clears everything with it bolted to the crank snout. But it cant be to much larger or it will run into the water pump, and possibly the oil pressure relief valve.
I was talking to Kermit about something a few years ago & he mentioned that he used a Mr. Gasket wheel. IIRC he'd pull the damper bolt & just used a longer one with a cylindrical spacer to mount the wheel. The pulley is about 6" OD, so a 7" wheel would only extend 1/2" beyond the damper. I'm pretty sure the pulley extends beyond the oil pressure relief valve, so the WP, the heat shield along the suspension rail, or something else is likely to set the size limit. I suspect that a 9" will go as it's only 1.5" larger than the damper. Am less sure about a 10". Wish we'd had this discussion before last Sunday as I was helping Chris pull his 2V engine & could have easily measured things. In my case, it's going to be even easier to mount one as I've got the spacer for the SC pulley to mount one to. It's very close to flush with the damper's front pulley. Umm, need to think about that mounting, I'll still need to get at the damper bolt to turn the engine tho.