Posts Tagged ‘weight’

Good Vibrations

Saturday, September 12th, 2009

Vibrations aren’t good so I’ve been troubleshooting them. One of them was from the motor because it was the same in neutral as in gear. So yesterday neighbor Mike and I pulled the transmission and clutch assembly. I spun the motor up with only the adapter and it was very smooth.

My understanding of the stock gas engine was that it was balanced, but actually the flywheel was used to balance it. So the engine was out of balance and the flywheel was out of balance but when you put them together they were balanced.

So I installed the flywheel on my motor and it was unbalanced, resulting in us pulling it apart and redoing it. I dropped the flywheel and clutch assembly off this morning at a machine shop and should have it back later this week. They’ll take off the cast-in weights on the back of the flywheel then remove additional material as needed to balance out.

The other vibration is due to my driveline angles. I measured with a digital 0.1 accuracy angle level and the motor was about 7 degrees lower in the rear, the driveshaft level, and the rear end 1.5 degrees lower in the rear. Both are in the same direction ( \_/ would be bad, \ _ \ is ok, / _ / is ok, /_\ would be bad). This is due to both the motor not being mounted level due to the steering rack and the rear end overloaded with battery weight. I have some stiffer springs and air bags to install to restore the rear ride height and will have to see what I can do with the motor.

The Big Weigh-In – November 15, 2008

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

One of the goals is to remove as much as possible from the Trans Am to reduce weight. Since we had parts off and I’ll want to clear the garage soon, I got my brother to help weigh everything. Here is a list of all the parts and the weights.