Another Mopar Off My Bucket List - Barracuda Fastback
More Charger mayhem, - more Charger headaches!
With the initial hole cut in the firewall for the Wilwood cylinders we were able to mock up the pedal assembly inside the car. It took a bit of tweaking to get everything centered where we wanted. Naturally the brake arm mounts on the right and the clutch arm on the left with the steering column running in between the two.
The problem is that that big Hemi seems to dictate location of everything. We'd probably have a lot more wiggle room if we didn't have to worry about clearing the valve covers. Spence has got Stage V heads coming and also ordered these Stage V valve covers to go with them.
The valve covers are back ordered so we won't have them here for awhile. We know they're supposed to be taller than stock Hemi covers and had to call for specs to figure out whether or not our Wilwood assembly would clear. I guess they're 5" tall at the highest point.
Nothing sounds too difficult so far and we could have mounted the pedals plenty high enough to clear them - but... that's when we noticed our next problem. The Wilwood pedals were mounted so high in the car that it would have been uncomfortable moving your feet from throttle to brake or even using the clutch. So we mounted the pedals at a height that felt best from inside the car. (and even then we decided to extend the pedals 1&1/2" further down) That left us with trying to figure out another way to clear the motor with the master cylinders.
Without having the valve covers here we could only make estimations from measurements off of our plastic mock up motor. We think we'll be OK if we recess the master cylinder mounts into the firewall an additional inch. Our plan is to have a spacer ring machined that's an inch thick. It will create additional headaches because the reservoirs will need to have their screw-in attachment locations relocated outward to clear that recess.
We'll work on the spacing more tomorrow and see if we can use some brass fittings to offset those reservoirs. For now we went ahead and cut the firewall out further and fabricated a filler plate.
More Charger mayhem, - more Charger headaches!
With the initial hole cut in the firewall for the Wilwood cylinders we were able to mock up the pedal assembly inside the car. It took a bit of tweaking to get everything centered where we wanted. Naturally the brake arm mounts on the right and the clutch arm on the left with the steering column running in between the two.
The problem is that that big Hemi seems to dictate location of everything. We'd probably have a lot more wiggle room if we didn't have to worry about clearing the valve covers. Spence has got Stage V heads coming and also ordered these Stage V valve covers to go with them.
The valve covers are back ordered so we won't have them here for awhile. We know they're supposed to be taller than stock Hemi covers and had to call for specs to figure out whether or not our Wilwood assembly would clear. I guess they're 5" tall at the highest point.
Nothing sounds too difficult so far and we could have mounted the pedals plenty high enough to clear them - but... that's when we noticed our next problem. The Wilwood pedals were mounted so high in the car that it would have been uncomfortable moving your feet from throttle to brake or even using the clutch. So we mounted the pedals at a height that felt best from inside the car. (and even then we decided to extend the pedals 1&1/2" further down) That left us with trying to figure out another way to clear the motor with the master cylinders.
Without having the valve covers here we could only make estimations from measurements off of our plastic mock up motor. We think we'll be OK if we recess the master cylinder mounts into the firewall an additional inch. Our plan is to have a spacer ring machined that's an inch thick. It will create additional headaches because the reservoirs will need to have their screw-in attachment locations relocated outward to clear that recess.
We'll work on the spacing more tomorrow and see if we can use some brass fittings to offset those reservoirs. For now we went ahead and cut the firewall out further and fabricated a filler plate.
