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Conversion plate BMW bellhousing – Sadev

After having changed our minds several times, we finally found a good solution to mount our Sadev properly on the S14 bottom block.

The original bellhousing of the Getrag 265 was our 1st and most obvious solution. For this we had a bit of cheating at Delage and we had drawn 2 aluminum plates of 18mm thick. One fit the bell and the other the Sadev. They were then screwed together.

Major pain point : the centering of the primary axis. Because we use a central hydraulic pressure bearing to activate our clutch, it was necessary to enlarge the original middle hole in the bellhousing and we lose our reference. We made another attempt to provide center buses but after a 3D measurement of 3 different bellhousing there turned out to be quite a lot of tolerance on the sizes. It is and remains, of course, a cast piece. So plan 1 removed.

Plan 2 an M10 bellhousing of a vending machine. Perfect in terms of construction but fairly fragile so we immediately removed that.

Fortunately, we were still able to shake plan 3 out of our sleeves. Again an automatic version but this time of a BMW M30. Equally perfect in terms of construction and quite robust. So you can see that an old 7 series can still contain interesting parts 🙂

Again we measured everything neatly on a 3D measuring bench and our draftsman on duty (Nick) transformed this into a single conversion plate of 56mm thick. We had to puzzle for a while because the S14 block is fairly twisted in the engine compartment and we would have liked to have our gearbox hang nice and straight.

We first printed the result on true large foil to see if everything fit neatly.

The next day the plate will be milled and we can assemble the entire drivline for the first time.

To be continued….

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