Whats the best way to line up the engine and gearbox so that the propellor shaft runs fine?

hmmm deja vu............ must be a glitch in the matrix

Lee, in the book Ron suggests a trial fitting of the engine / gearbox when the chassis is half built. He shows this in a picture, and the chassis has all the bottom outside rails on plus some of the vertical posts.

I think the answer to your question is to simply try it out. If you haven't started building your chassis you could make a mock-up using 1" square timber.

There are several tried and tested dimensions flying about regarding engine centre lines depending on what engine you using.... let us know what you intend to use?

Hornet,
Sorry to jump in here but I'd be interested in seeing the tried and tested centreline dims for the Rover V8 3500 engine. I'm using the McSorley +4inch wide chassis.
Cheers,
Craig.

Are you building a book chassis or an IRS chassis . Is it a self built chassis?. If the engine and the axle are mounted centrally the offset on the diff should give you the angle to run the propshaft at. If it runs dead straight the prop joints will fail, apparently, due to the wiping effect on the bearings ( a bloke down the pub told me so it must be right)

yours Pete.

It's called "Brinnelling", although my spelling is suspect.

If everything is straight the ball bearings will chatter in their races and will eventually cause pitting.

The front section of the propshaft must be parallel to the rear section, but the bit in the middle should be at an angle of around 3 degrees. If you mount a Ford solid axle centrally (i.e. the wheels are equi-distant from the centreline) then the layout of the diff means that you get this angle automagically.

rgds,

David

David,

I've offset my engine to the left (near side) by 1.5". This will mean it ain't straight (but not excessively).

See Peteff's comments for my other excuse.

Incidentally, in JD's Tiger book, the Pinto(?) is also offset, so it can't be a problem.

ATB

Simon

This page has good info on the brinelling thing...

http://www.markwilliams.com/technical/sb0049.pdf

It has a very good drawing of what I was trying to describe in my last post.

David