Shocking Lack Of Communication

May 30th 2013

Oh dear. I haven't been keeping up to date with the blog and progress on the car has been leaping ahead.

Where to start?  Well moving on from the last post I finished the adaptor plate to connect the engine and box. I made dowels to locate it to the motor and also to the gearbox. These were welded into the plate so the bolts to the motor and to the box are not locating the two, just clamping them together.

The counersunk hole is where an engine bolt is beneath the bellhousing flange. The same applies to the bolt welded on beneath the starter hole, as once the gearbox is on you can't reach that.


I had decided to fit the plate to the engine rather than the gearbox already. Luckily the 6mm steel I was using allowed a 2mm clearance between the plate and the flywheel.

The spigot bearing in the flywheel was far to small for the input shaft on the Talbot gearbox so I found a great local engineer who made me a new spigot bearing to fit into the flywheel. You can see the spigot bearing here. It has a PTFE liner and a "top hat" cut around the outside so that I can get a socket on the flywheel bolts.
I had to swap the Vitara flywheel for the smaller Jimny one (10") to get it to fit into the Talbot bellhousing. The Jimny clutch cover fitted over the Imp driven plate. It all seems to fit together, although I've been warned that the driven plate is thicker (8mm) than most (6/7mm) so may not clear properly when running! 

The 2mm clearance between the flywheel and the adaptor plate

I had to align the starter with the ring gear and as I was using the "fat" Vitara starter, but a smaller flywheel it meant grinding a bit of the cylinder block (and the starter casing) to get clearance.

Fitting the box to the engine was a long process as I had to get the input shaft and the spigot bearing in the flywheel absolutely concentric. It meant standing the engine on it's nose and putting the gearbox on top. Then moving the box and measuring until it was as close as I could get it before drilling the dowel holes from the plate to the gearbox. Now they are fixed it should be possible to repeat the proper fit any time I replace the box onto the engine.

The next thing was to have a trial fitting and mmark where the engine mounts needed to be. There are no mounts in the chassis as the Imp enginewas just hung on the front of the gearbox. Not an idea I was fond of. It had created a crack in the bellhousing. It had been previously welded up, but needed another attempt, which my new friend did for me.

The sump was a daft shape with the sump plug hanging down from the bottom. You can see it in the picture of the flywheel at the top of this post. I scribed a 2" mark around it and cut the bottom off. I had some 1mm plate so cut a patch and was going to weld it with Mig, but a test piece showed that it was too easy to overheat and blow through on a long run. So, you guessed, I got Richard (I'll give him a name, and as that is his name, that's the one I'll use) to weld it using Tig, which is more like gas welding. I really wish I could justify having gas welding gear as that's what I am good at. But apart from little rushes of activity like this it would just lay idle.

Just about ready to think about getting it all in the car.

This shot is before the cutting of the sump


I'm rushing through this a bit as the detail would be a bit boring and there is a lot to describe.


The next post I'll describe the fitting. Ian, my passenger, came to give me a hand.