I'm almost done with my 5-speed conversion for the bugeye.
I took last week off and was hoping to have the conversion compleated by now,
but one thing led to another, and to make a long story short, I ended up having
my engine bored and honed in the process (new pistons too). In any case the
motor is back together (except the head will need mounted) and I have the 210
tranny bolted up and ready to reinstall back into the engine bay. I orginally
removed the head on the engine so I could remove the engine without taking the
bonnet off.
In any case, I'm going to recheck the cam timing before I reinstall, just to
make sure I got everyhing back together correctly ;-)
I have the Rivergate kit, but I took Crash's and a couple other listers advice,
and had Paul Asgeirsson of Morris service, nodify my flywheel to accept the
Nissan pressure plate assembly (nice work). I did notice when I bolted up the
Rivergate backing plate to the engine, I had to open up the locating dowl holes
very slightly to get eveything to line up properly. I also had to open up two
of
the screw holes for the counter sunk screws that mount the plate to the back of
the engine. This was no big deal, since the back plate is aluminum, and I just
used a very slightly over sized drill bit (1/64 over). The tranny bolted right
up with no issues.
I made a new clutch line from a prefab 42" copper/nickel pipe I picked up from
Minimania ($13), and have bent it up in the 'stock' tradition, with a couple of
coils in it, simular to the 'original' bugeye clutch line. The line already had
the fittings on the ends, and screws right into the Master, and stock slave
cylinders.
My next challenge will be the speedometer cable. Rivergate has some
instructions
for this, however they seem pretty confusing. It looks like I'm supposed to use
the stock 210 speedo cable, and replace the speedo end with the coupling off my
sprite speedo cable. (Any suggestions here woud be appreciated:-)
Since the car was running pretty well before I started, I'm hoping that it will
fire up OK, onnce I get everthing back together. My only concern is making sure
I got the timing gears and distributor drive back in properly so that I didn't
change any of the timing there.
BTW - I picked up a new head gasket from Minimania, that looks pretty good, it
has a 'silver' finish to it, and has metal 'rings around all water jacket
holes,
as well as the oil and cylinders. They recommended this one over the 'copper'
one, and said they used it in all thier race engines. It is about 25-50%
thicker
than the 'copper' gasket, and is fibre material has a silver coating simular to
to the spray-on copper coat. Has anyone had any experience with this gasket?
- Bryan Vandiver (59-bugeye)
San Jose, CA
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