Hi gang,
So up to this point my alternator conversion has gone relatively smoothly, given
the amount of time I've been able to work on it and the fact that the car is
separated from the place where I do metal work by about five miles. Up until
last night. I was going to limp the Tiger over to the shop with some temporary
bracketry holding the alternator in, and all I needed to do was to go and get a
fan belt that was four inches shorter than what was on the car. Except that I
can't get the fan belt off of the car because the crank pulley is way too close
to the steering rack.
I had noticed this before, because the pulley was actually leaving marks on the
rack, but I never really thought through the implications regarding fan belt
removal. I read Cullen Bennett's tech tip on the motor mount heat shields, and
he mentioned that the engine mounts are 'handed' and if they are mounted on the
wrong side then it will force the engine forward a little. So I spent about an
hour under the car looking at it and trying to measure stuff with a tape
measure, and it looked to me like the two pieces were identical. The
transmission mount sits all the way forward in the slots in the tubular
crossmember, so there is room to go back from that point of view. I measured up
the frame between the engine mounts and the crossmember mounts, and that seems
to be according to spec. There is no visible frame damage in the front area. The
crossmember has some dings underneath but does not look like it's been modified
regarding rack location.
For lack of any better ideas I pulled the engine mounts and the cast iron
frame-to-engine-mount pieces (and a fun job that was), and compared them. The
cast iron pieces are 'handed' and you can't mount them on the wrong side because
the bolt holes wouldn't line up with the frame. The engine mounts (the rubber
sandwich) are identical except for some rubber distortion. The left hand cast
iron piece has the number 1981001 cast into it; the right, 1981000 (as best I
can tell). The engine mounts both have the numbers 31-2221 molded into one face
of the rubber, and 31-2220 into the opposite face, and "made in Mexico".
The crank pulley measures 1 15/16" in length (49 mm) from the center of the V
groove to the rear face where it bolts to the damper. It is directly in line
with the water pump pulley (on a correct pump), and had decent alignment with
the generator when that was on the car.
So what gives?
(a) What kind of engine mounts do I have? How obviously different should they
be?
(b) Is the crank pulley correct? IF not, then I also have the wrong water pump
pulley, and some really weird permutation of the generator bracket.
(c) What is the normal distance between the front pulley and the rack?
I would really appreciate any and all comments on this one.
Thanks in advance,
Theo Smit
tsmit@novatel.ca
B382002705
|