‘Tis the season!

By Jay Roeder

Hi everyone and welcome back! As the title says, “tis the season!”

Apparently it’s the season for COLD! As I sit here beginning what will surely be yet another literary masterpiece it is a balmy SIX stinking degrees outside with a wind chill of -20 F! Not to worry though as we also received about 10 inches of new snow along with the wind and arctic chill. Times like these make me wish global warming was real. I digress.

I moved the bolt circle inboard on the crank drive mandrel using my Bridgeport Mill and turned a Ford mandrel into a Chevy. Yes, it hurt.	I machined down the old Ford diameter on the lathe and made it a Chevy diameter to fit the new MSD wheel. Yes, it hurt again.

On to the taters.

In the last article I said that I would go into more detail of the mounting of the MSD Crank Trigger wheel and associated parts and I will along with a few new goodies for the Muscrate. One thing I did not realize immediately was that the used and rebuilt ATI Super Damper I sourced from Roush Yates Performance Parts (hereafter referred to as RYPP) used a GM 3-bolt pulley pattern. I guess I just assumed a Ford engine builder would be using a Ford pattern but I was mistaken. I was told that Roush Yates did make their own Ford crank mandrels for awhile but once again the evil head of GM interchangeability reared its head and it just makes financial sense in this case for them to use the more readily available GM pattern on both the damper and the mandrels. The pulleys are actually made by CV Products.

So, the Moroso crank drive assembly I was planning to re-use would not work because it was for the Ford patterns. This ended up not being a big deal and I actually like the way the CV Products pulleys are dowel pin located to each other and some of the pulleys have a special male/female shape machined into them that really locks things together.

Another big benefit of using these pulleys and mandrels is they are available used, or new if you desire, from RYPP. As a matter of fact RYPP has a huge selection of used pulleys available in different diameters, tooth counts, tooth styles, and widths. I’m telling you most of this stuff from RYPP looks new.

It’s amazing what gets “timed out” or replaced due to an engineering change. All the better for us! I was also planning on reusing my MSD

Crank Trigger wheel but it too was for a Ford pattern so I ordered a new 3-bolt GM wheel.

I had a selection of crank mandrels to choose from and, due to spacing of my various belt-driven accessories, the shortest of them was the one with, of course, the Ford pattern. But I’m pretty handy so I decided to move the bolt pattern inward and did this with my Bridgeport mill. Instead of drilling the holes out larger I actually moved them inward which makes a slight oval shape of the holes.