It’s been a busy week on the Miura project and as a result there was a lot accomplished. I made a trip to San Diego, Ca (a 7+ hour drive from where I live) to visit Pete Aardema and Kevin Braun with the objective to make the changes necessary so the Coyote and transaxle combination will fit properly in the Miura chassis. The two outstanding fitment issues were the damper pulley hitting the frame rail and CV/axles hitting the frame rail.
The Coyote damper pulley is made to run a two serpentine belt system. My approach to making it fit was to convert it to a single belt by parting off the outer half of the damper. Pete chucked it up in a lathe and quickly made the alteration.
With the narrowed damper pulley, there is now about ½” clearance between it and the frame rail.
The water pump used the outer belt so that needs to be addressed. As you can see in the picture above, there is also a lack of clearance between the thermostat housing and the roll bar upright. The thermostat housing is mounted directly to the water pump. My intention is to replace the belt driven water pump with an electric water pump. This should eliminate need for a water pump drive belt and with an electronic controller the need for a thermostat. I think I’ve found a good product to do this but am still trying to verify that it will work in this application given the 8 plus feet of tubing between the radiator and engine.
Now onto the much more complicated transaxle modification to rotate the final drive case. Here’s a before picture showing the main clearance issue when final drive is rotated to the desired position. Notice the ear sticking out from middle case that hits differential housing and mounting bolts.
Unfortunately I was so busy doing other things that I forgot to take progress pictures of Kevin Braun doing the machining operations. It included CNC machining away metal on the transmission middle case to provide clearance for the newly angled final drive case, counter sinking some fasteners, drilling holes for new alignment dowels between the cases, and drilling/tapping new holes for mounting bolts. The prior holes that protruded into the middle case were filled to prevent oil leakage. Because of Kevin’s expertise and deep precision machining talents, he was able to get it done in about a day.
To prove to ourselves that the CV would have the needed clearance, the engine and transaxle was test fit into the chassis.
In addition to the above, we were also able to make a clutch shaft pilot bushing, dial-in the bell housing, positively located the clutch shaft to prevent rubbing on the transfer case, add dowel pins for positive pressure plate alignment and adapt a starter for mounting on the opposite side of the engine.
On the Coyote engine, Ford locates the starter on the passenger side of the engine. We were able to move it to drivers side of the engine block by enlarging an existing hole in the block to accept a Hitachi gear reduction starter. This starter is commonly used as an aftermarket replacement on many different engines by utilizing different adapter plates. We machined up a special adapter plate that uses 2 bell housing mount bolts extended though the threaded block holes and a third bolt tapped directly into engine block to mount the starter. We hooked it up to a battery and the starter engaged the ring gear fine and easily spun the engine over.
Well it was very much worth the 2 days of driving and 2 days of work to get all this done. My special thanks and acknowledgement goes out to Pete Aardema and Kevin Braun for helping me with this project and contributing stuff that goes way beyond my abilities.