New Transmission  28                 March  2012

What I needed to do now is measure the distance between the bung (that I just welded on) and the bracket that the bolt will go through because this is where my pivot pin goes. I couldn't get my calipers in there because the transmission was in the way so I brought home my telescopic gage (snap gage) to help me get the right dimension.

To use a gage like this all you do is collapse the ends together with your fingers and then tighten the screw on the end. Once you have the gage in place, you loosen the screw and the ends of the gage springs outward against the two surfaces that you want to measure. When the ends are in contact you then tighten the screw and then measure across the ends for your dimension. This worked out well and once I had the dimension that I needed, I machined off the excess from one end of the pin.

The ring that you see is a spacer that I made to take up the remaining space between the bung and pedals. It's made out of 17-4PH stainless steel and is the same diameter as the pedal boss's and is a slip fit on the pivot pin. The reason I made it out of stainless steel is because it will help prevent against rust.
 

 

 
Here you can see the ring in place with the pedals and should work fine. I made the pivot pin .005" longer than pedals and ring stack-up are because that way when the bolt is tightened down, all the clamping pressure will be on the pin and not the pedals so they can still rotate properly.
 

 

 
Here are the pedals bolted in place and they move nice and free. Once they go back together for the final time I'll add some lubricant to the pin to make sure they stay that way. Now it's time to work on the exhaust system for this side only because with the pedals mounted where they are, they're in the way now.
 

 

 
I bolted one header tube on to get an idea where the collector needed to end up to clear the new bracket on my pedals. I wired the collector in place to keep it from moving and then I could get some measurements.
 

 

 
On the back side I clamped a piece of wood to my chassis to place the collector in the middle of my X member. This way the height would be right about where it needed to be. Now it's time to do more cutting and welding.
 

 

 
The ends of the header tubes don't line up with my collector anymore but they're close. My plan is to cut off the ends off the header tubes a small amount and then weld on another piece of tubing at the correct angle.

I'm cutting the tube at a slight angle here and then I'll weld on another piece that matches it. This is a trial and error process so an exact angle isn't really needed because I'll fit the new piece to this tube later. After cutting this I used my belt sander to straighten out the rough saw cut. Notice the smaller piece of tubing on the bench, this will be sanded and fitted to the header tube which is about 2 3/4" long by 1 7/8" in diameter. I got lucky here because I had a couple of short pieces of tubing left over from when I built my headers years ago.
 

 

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