NOTE:This is a double post that will be copied to the Mighty Boy forum as well - sorry for the duplication.
In addition to a project 1985 550 Auto (with air conditioner) Mighty Boy, I have a 1984 hatch manual with the F8B engine. My grandaughter is working on it for a college project.
On removing the gearbox to replace the clutch, she found the flywheel has been graunched (a technical term equivalent to deviant sexual acts performed on mechanical devices) - needless to say it'll never be the same again...
The result is that of the six threaded holes on the flywheel there is the following:
- 2 perfectly threaded holes.
- 2 very dodgy looking holes with excessively shiny threads that look like they are gonna need rework.
- 1 bolt broken off in the lugs and a crack in the lug itself - the bolt shows signs of having been cracked for some time (2/3rds of the break shows signs on prolonged oil penetration) and it broke off too easily.
- 1 hole that has two cracks in the lug and a not too impressive appearance.
I suspect that a mentally retarded gibbon replaced the last clutch for the previous owner...
Option 1 - Repair It
I took it to a local machine/engineering works and they said "It's cast iron and a bastard to weld properly. We could weld it, but it'd probably create local hard spots in the friction face that'd ruin your clutch plate in no time ".
Basically they were not interested.
Question:
- Does anyone know of anybody in the Canberra Region who could weld and machine this thing for me? - There is no damage to the flywheel apart from the lugs that the clutch bolts onto.
I have a flywheel from another vehicle, I think it was a manual Mighty Boy with a F5A engine (but I'm not certain so if there's a way of identifying them can someone tell me?)
Visually it looks a lot like the F8B one, it weighs around the same amount (hand weighed only so far) but...
- There's a ball bearing fitted to the centre of the F5A one and there's just a hole in the F8B one.
- The bore of the F5A flywheel bearing is much smaller that the hole in the F8B flywheel - but if you remove the bearing from the F5A flywheel then the bore would be much larger that the F8B one
- Can anyone tell me what the differences are between the F5A and F8B flywheels are?
- Can they be interchanged? (I'm thinking the mass would be different, the F5A one would be lighter and using the F5A would be a bad idea - but if I'm wrong, please tell me...)
- Could I just press out the bearing in the F5A flywheel and use that instead?
I've searched every web site I can find to locate a second hand one, but I cannot find anything.
i tried Gumtree, e-Bay, and every other site I know. I did a search for F8B flywheel, suzuki 800 flywheel, suzuki ss80v flywheel and every other thing I could think of. NO LUCK unless I want to import from OS and that would involve freight (which might be more than I can afford)
Questions:
- Does anyone know of any possible source for a replacement flywheel?
- Does anyone know of any particularly good wreckers, web sites, etc?
- Does anyone have a spare flywheel?
This is the scariest one for my wallet - and my marriage... (and my health)
I could go out and buy another hatch/mighty boy (using a considerable number of beer tokens) and rip out the clutch/flywheel. That would solve one problem, but introduce another - a break in the space/time/dollar/sense of humour continuum...
This would be a last resort and unless it came with a bucket of spares that would help me convert the Mighty Boy to and F8B engined manual, then the risk of my wife's rage achieving critical mass just would not bear thinking about.
Question:
- Does anyone have a rusty old hatch with a load of good spare parts within 200kms of Canberra that they want to almost give me?
Any help or advice would be very gratefully appreciated.
Thanks in advance
John Hamilton
Banks ACT
