So it's been awhile since I've updated this. As some of you may know, I drove in the Rolex 24 at Daytona this year with Bennett Racing the team I co-founded with a good friend of mine Skip Bennett. That tied up every last bit of my spare time for most of the last year and a half, now that the race is over and things have settled down some, I'm focusing most of my attention to this project. Lots of things are in the works right now, the engine should hopefully be done in the next week or two. I built the bottom end and had a good friend of mine "BC" finish putting it together as he is going to port my heads and do some other things to help me out. While the engine is being assembled I wanted to test fit the tranny using the spare block I have. So I read on another forum that a guy was using a Jerico and ran into some major clearance issues with the external shifter. This was a little scary because my Tex Racing trans is also externally shifted. So Saturday morning I decided to go ahead and take care of this issue.
Step 1
Then I immediately got the full scope of how much room I needed to make this thing fit.
I made my first cut to get the shifter mount up through the tunnel so I could get the engine and tranny at the correct angle of declination of 2.0 degrees.
So its a little tough to see in the above pictures from inside the tunnel but the shifter assembly has to mount to the left side of that aluminum bracket. So the clearance issue is pretty obvious.
Everything sitting at 2 degrees
The cutting to clearance the rods started early this morning. I know it looks scary but I'm going to make a removable cover/structure that will encase everything. I want is easy to remove so I can service the linkage if I need to. It will also make it easier to get to the grease fitting on the tailshaft.
I was really worried about where the shifter was going to end up and if I was going to make a crazy shift lever in order to make it functional but I actually and really really happy with where it ended up. I made a temporary lever just to get an idea of what it was going to be like and I'm stoked. I'm probably going to make a pretty tall lever to get the knob within 6in of the steering wheel. More to come this week.
