I have usually removed old ring gears by carefully drilling two holes in them
and then cutting through with a chisel. Seems to have worked fine for me.
Obviously I had a new ring gear ready to go in!!!.
You can "reverse" the ring gear with no apparent difficulties. I have never
done that, I have simply swapped starters (MUCH easier). A starter from a '69
Alpine GT or Arrow will bolt in and the gear engages from the front of the
engine, not the rear (as it does with the inertia starters). The cars I did
this to started up with no problems for years afterward. My thinking was that
if I ever DID get a problem and "ruined" the ring gear... it was ruined
already and I had just put off changing it. However, I never did "ruin" the
ring gear and drove the cars for years afterward.
Jan Eyerman
1962 Hillman Minx Series IIIC convertible
1973 Plymouth Cricket
45+ years of experience on Rootes (and other LBC's)
jumpinjan <jservaites@woh.rr.com> wrote:
Yes, one can rotate the gear so that the starter doesn't always hit the
same teeth (I have noticed that apparently the engine usually stops at
some common location in it's cycles and it's usually the same teeth that
get the starter impact). The problem here is you can't get the ring gear
to hot with a torch, otherwise it doesn't seem to cool to the original
diameter and will walk off the flywheel. Look at some flywheels and
sometimes there is a gap starting between the gear & the flywheel. To
keep the ring gear on, usually it's okay to lay a small bead of weld to
secure it.
Look at the Rootes shop manual and you will see that the removal is to
use a gas torch on the damaged ring gear. However, to heat up the new
replacement gear, a hot oil bath is used and I think that's to avoid
overheating the new gear.
I don't understand "flipping" the gear over. The gear is only installed
in one direction & shouldn't be installed backwards.
Jan
|