Wednesday, July 17, 2013

A New clutch

Although the clutch appeared to be in good condition, we had purchased a 3-in-1 clutch kit (release bearing, clutch cover, and clutch disc) a while back and figured we would replace these parts while we had easy access to them.  Installing a new clutch was pretty straight forward and replacing the release bearing was also straight forward after Fred realized he had a few pullers stowed away in a box in the garage. 

To replace the release bearing in the bell housing, the release bearing mounting hub was removed from the clutch lever and a puller was used to separate the release bearing from the release bearing mounting hub.  The trick to using the puller was putting the unit in the vice and placing a socket inside the bearing (socket diameter was smaller than the bearing but larger than the mounting hub diameter).  The socket provided something for the puller shaft to press against. (Sorry, I forgot to take pictures of this.)

To remove the clutch cover and clutch disc, 6 bolts were unscrewed from the clutch cover and the whole unit came off.

Replacing was the opposite of removing, but before tightening the bolts down, we had to make sure the clutch was aligned.  To do this, Victoria British sells an alignment tool that is a shortened model of the transmission input shaft.  You put the tool through the center of the clutch and make sure everything aligns accordingly before tightening down the bolts to spec....

...but since I did not get the alignment tool (I thought I purchased one, but actually did not), we used the old fashioned method.  We removed the bell housing from the transmission and Chris put the transmission shaft through the clutch and held up the transmission while I tightened down the bolts. Removing the bell housing was a necessary step so that we could get access to the clutch cover bolts while the transmission shaft was put in place for alignment.


...nice, shiny new clutch cover and disc.

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