Plates, Pulleys, and Quick Shifting!

Like most engines, the Zetec has a plate that goes between the block and the gearbox bell housing. Unlike the one on the Spitfire engine this serves no purpose other than filling in the gaps! The plate from the Mondeo (my donor car) is designed for the front wheel drive gearbox and is the wrong shape for the Type 9 so it was tossed. (in fact it was cut up and used to make the brackets for the front Goodridge hoses!) Rather than hunting round scrap yards for an old Sierra with a plate I could buy I made one by simply putting the gearbox on it's end and drawing round it. A bit of cutting, grinding, drilling, filing, and painting and hey presto one plate was born. I'm getting into this fabrication lark!

I've bought Canley Classics' uprated 55amp alternator for this car which comes with a pulley designed for a standard V belt. The belt on the Zetec engine has 6 ridges so I need to use the pulley from the Mondeo's alternator. Here are the two pulleys:

You can probably tell that the pulley on the left uses a Woodruff key to keep it from slipping whereas the one on the right is just done up tight! unfortunately the diameter of the hole in the Zetec pulley is bigger than the thread it needs to fit on. I want the pulley to sit as true and as central as possible so I don't have drive belts jumping off and alternator bearings wearing out prematurely. My solution is to get the original pulley (left) machined down so it fit's inside the Zetec pulley and weld the two together. Talon in Yeovil (they make hubs and sprockets for race bikes) are doing the machining for me and I'll add some more photos when I get it back even if it doesn't work!

Final thing to report is the delivery of my quick shifter which I thing is ruddy cool! I've seen a Quaife one on Demon Tweaks for £75 and the one I bought (eBay!) is obviously a copy but it looks exactly the same (it's even the same shade of green!) and the quality of the machining is excellent and it was half the price.