Roland Dudley wrote:
>The 6-bolt has two problems: 1) a mismatch to the gearbox bolt pattern,
>and 2) a mismatch to the clutch slave bracket. I found out about both
>of these the hard way. For the gearbox I bought an adaptor plate that
>bolts up to the bellhousing and has the correct pattern for the
>gearbox- a T10 in my case. However, this changes the overall length of
>the engine/transmission combo by half an inch or so. Maybe this would
>have been okay, but I wasn't comfortable with it and I wasn't about to
>shorten my driveshaft. I gave the adaptor away- to Frank, as a matter
>of fact.
Frank, don't use that adapter plate Roland gave you!
I bought a Tiger that came with a similar arrangement---a 1/2inch adapter
plate between a 6-bolt engine and a 5-bolt bellhousing. The result was that
the plate just spaced everything back 1/2inch farther than it should have
been. Thus the front end of the transmission input shaft was not even in the
pilot bearing, and the whole thing, including the clutch disk, had been
whipping around wildly because it was completely unsupported! This caused
failure of the input shaft bearing, which had beat out the bore in the front
of the transmission into a deformed egg-shape. The damage was aggravated in
this case because the transmission was a rare aluminum-case (soft)T10.
Fortunately, it was repairable. Because the whole gearbox was spaced back,
the shift linkage was bound up on the inside of the transmission tunnel, and
the shift lever didn't come up through the tunnel properly. There was no
problem with the driveshaft, however, because the yoke was easily able to
slide up the shaft splines another 1/2inch. The whole thing was a Rube
Goldberg solution that created more problems than it solved.
My advice to anyone contemplating using an adapter plate between a 6-bolt
engine and a 5-bolt bellhousing? FORGET IT!
Dick Barker
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