Dino Saga 060205 _ Fine tune clutch, discuss 2004 rebuild

Dino Saga 060205 _ Fine tune clutch, discuss 2004 rebuild

Dino runs good! Mileage is better too. 14 mpg around town. Up from 10! Went through another tank of gas. This time to Ojai and a little past. Road winds nicely.

Only problem left is first gear. Jack officially retired as of Monday and took most of the week off; just because he could. I told him to enjoy; first could wait. He will be back to finish Steve’s Dino. And let me use one of the lifts and give a little advice. The 1st-Reverse fork has slid on the shaft so that you have too much throw in reverse and not enough in first. 5 minutes to fix, after draining the trans., removing the cover. Then have to replace gasket, put on cover, replace gear oil. 2 hours ought to do it. Some time this week.

Quick recap: Scott of Scott’s of Santa Barbara removed, rebuilt engine and replaced it in 2004. He pulled engine apart and sent heads and block to Import Auto Machine Shop for valves, cam regrinding, boring, pistons, rings and bearings. I looked over machine shop work and it looked fine when delivered to Scott. Assembly took forever and was a disaster. Oil, smoke, noise. Engine was strong but ready to blow at any moment.

Drove for a few months and kept finding bent, broken and loose parts. Leaks got worse. Talked to Joe and Matt at Import Auto and they said they could probably tear down and rebuild engine properly. They had never done a Dino but they do lots of race cars, hot rods, Porshes, Mercedes, etc. They have no ability to pull or replace an engine so I asked Jack Bianchi if he would yank and replace. He pulled it 20 years ago and got it back just fine. He said OK so here we are. It is good working with Jack again and hope he keeps his hands a little dirty in his retirement.

Scott is out of business and out of town. Bad vibes in all directions.

I mentioned small clutch problem last week. 8-10 years ago the clutch cable got gritty so I replaced it. Turns out that the replacement cable was not an exact duplicate. The outer sheath was about an inch shorter or the inner rod about an inch longer. Bottom line was that the linkage and helper spring could not be adjusted properly. I modified both clevises on the cable so that they could screw on farther. Drilled new pin hole in clutch end clevis. Then I added spacers at the clutch pedal end of the cable. This got me the adjustment you see in the pics. Clutch pedal-up limit is the cable so spacer on sheath and rod kept things even. I should have added a spacer on sheath at engine but didn’t. Some day.

The 10mm offset of the pivot points is OK. As long as the offset is in the right direction, the clutch will be OK. When the offset goes negative, the throwout bearing is always riding on the clutch and trouble is on the way. When the offset goes larger, clutch is weird. Note drawing from book is looking from front to back. Pics are back to front.

Life is good.

John
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