Background


Of the many options and kits available we have chosen the South African Birkin - a kit which faithfully reproduces the beauty of Colin Chapman's original car and which you build up with component parts from the factory, adding in your choice of engine and transmission.



This holds true to the tradition of garden shed mechanics without requiring quite the level of welding skill, or CAD programming, that some of the amazing, home built clubman cars require. Or at least we hope not, as neither of us have done anything like this before.....



Saturday, August 28, 2010

Gearbox and Flywheel

We're using a Sierra Type 9 gearbox courtesy of Eurospeed Motorsport. It's a close ratio 'box with a low range first plus a few other upgrades. We also went for the short shift lever which has a great action and finally couldn't resist adding a billet gear knob.
They have also supplied us with a lightened flywheel which is dwarfed by the original dual mass item. As a result our clutch slave cylinder needed bringing forwards on spacers which precipitated repeated assemblies and dismantling, but eventually we got it right. We also needed to widen the aperture in the bell housing with the trusty Dremmel to allow for the repositioned clutch hose and bleed pipe.

2 comments:

  1. Hi ya..

    looking good so far, just curious to how far forward you have to moved the clutch master clylinder.

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  2. Hi Matt - sorry for slow response and thanks for your comment. The short answer is I don't have the distance any more. As the lightened fly wheel is so thin the clutch pressure plate fingers no longer touched the thrust bearing using Birkins gear box cylinder mount. To compensate we added longer bolts with 4 alum sleaves between the cylinder mount and the gear box until the thrust plate engaged sufficiently. It was about 20 mm extra but easy to calculate using pressure plate to block against thrust plate to edge of Bell housing distances. Hope this helps and feel free to ask any other questions.

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