BP Bellhousing CAD drawing
 

Help!

Has anyone here ever done a cad drawing of a BP bellhousing? Most likely for building a transmission adapter plate... someone here must have done it before I'd think?

I'm trying to put an MR2 turbo trans on my fwd BP, in case you were wondering. I have access to a CNC plasma cutter table (girlfriend's father :)), but I don’t have the tools or skills to accurately measure and draw the bellhousing patterns. If I can get a drawing of each I could combine them into something useful, though.

Please shoot me a PM if you have any drawings available, thanks!

I think there is one floating around....i remember reading possibly m2cupcar or someone who did the TII conversion.


I fixed your sig pic btw.

thanks, i'll search around!

thanks for fixing that... i havent been here in a while, i actually need to update it too. i've since run a 12.28 @ 117, and dynoed 320 whp :D. a couple weeks later i grenaded my transmission... so yeah. 3k miles out of a freshly rebuilt gearbox is unacceptable :(

just upload a new sig pic. should be in the edit signature area.

I'd love to get a copy of it! I did my TII adapter plate by hand :(

how did your plate turn out doing it by hand? ive run into two seperate schools of thought... people like you who've done it by hand with transfer punches and a drill press, and other people who say "that will never work, it needs to have 0.002" tolerances and be made on a CNC".

have you run into any issues after doing the conversion? what was your exact method, how precise were you?

not me- IIRC it was somebody on m.net from FL that planned to build an order of the adapter plates but it never happened.

well if someone can come up with a BP drawing and a TII drawing, maybe i could have some of those plates cut up as well... *wink wink nudge nudge* :)

as i said in my thread on m.net, i'm not an engineer or a machinist, but i do have (very affordable) access to a CNC plasma cutter table... i just need to provide a drawing.

Mine worked out great, but I did have access to a very good drill press and a manual mill.

We made a plate between a VW TDI and a supra 5 speed. Totally by hand (cutting with a plasma, drilling on a drill press) and it worked just fine, the first time.

I'm always lost trying to make measurements like that. Stuff comes out, but I never feel right about it.

If it matters, a friend of a friend has a 418whp mr2 turbo beast that goes through trannys fairly regularly.
Maybe it's his driving style but the threshold for pain in those trannys is somewhere near where he is power-wise.

As far as i've been able to find, the MR2 turbo trannies are some of the most durable compact transverse mount manual transmissions you can get. It must have something to do with his driving style or possibly clutch choice (unsprung hubs and puck discs kill trannies!). I've seen a 700awhp celica gt4's running 10's reliably with a stock gearbox. The awd gearbox is the same as the mr2 gearbox... you can actually convert between the two with bolt-together parts. The MR2 diff and block off plate is replaced by a rear transfer case. Either way, I doubt I'll every clear 400whp and my car is significantly lighter than an MR2 :).

Worst comes to worst I might end up doing this by hand myself. All the machine shops I called today told me "sorry we don’t do that, call someone with a CNC."

If someone has the dimensions I can CAD it up.

I might even be tempted to tackle it.. This is what I did today:

http://abefm.smugmug.com/photos/452041527_a7H9Q-L.png

damn, what is that? looks a hell of a lot harder to draw than a bellhousing pattern :P

getting the dimensions measured accurately i guess is going to be the hardest part. anyone have a spare block or tranny and the right tools to get these guys started? i have parts but no measuring tools...

sixshooter - could you ask your friend what tends to fail in his transmissions? i'm curious if there is a common weak point.

checked with a place who does CMM and they want $250 for each transmission... which would put me at roughly $600 to make this adapter.... no thanks

if anyone has the proper tools to measure and draw this thing i can mail you a bellhousing to measure from...

Huh. I have a tranny. All I need is a large scanner. :-)

hmmm, i cant help you out there unfortunately :(

I have the bell housing/ Transmission just no real way to measure it.

Actually I will check with the machine shop that was originally going to help with the oil gears.

Well, you can always do it with transfer punches. put the tranny on a plate or something semi-soft, and bang with a transfer punch though each hole, being sure not to move it. Worst case you spend some of the bugjet you would have spent having it done doing it this way. If you know the distance from each hole to each other, you can reconstruct it pretty fast. Odds are reasonable most of the distances work out to be something sensible in metric.

At least, after this long I'd be willing to try it. :-)

Huh, not metric, but i have transfer punches at work. And I could make a bushing to get a tight fit. Wouldn't tell me where the output shaft goes, but it would be most of a start, that I could get by other means. Maybe I'll get on that.

I have the old 5 speed out of my '92 I can measure and draw up at work. The trans is in storage at my brother's house; I should be picking it up sometime this week.

Awesome!

Out of curiosity, how do you do it? Put in pegs and measure the separation of the dowels? I've done that, too, but again, never feel good about it.

Pegs in dowel holes?

We have a Faro arm at work for digitizing stuff. I'll just put the trans on a table, make the bellhousing face a plane, and pick up the mounting hole locations, dowels, input shaft, and outer profile.

=o

turbotim, it sounds like you're about to become my hero, lol

let us know how it turns out :)

Sigh, I figured you'd cheat like that.

You CAN put dowels (or screws) in each hole, measure the distance from the outside of one to the outside of the other, subtract one bolt diameter from it, that's the distance between them. Do it for every pair, sit down for a nice long day of math (or use a constraint based CAD package) and get where they all go. But it's a huge pain, and more error prone.

High tech equipment for the win.

Here is a .dxf of the bellhousing of my '92 5 speed. It is the raw data from the Faro arm. Sorry, I do not have time to go thru and make it all pretty-like.

Let me know if you need any other info on this, I may have measured it.

Thanks to Paul for hosting this.

Tim

http://www.inoneear.com/outtheother/MazdaBPTrans.DXF

Couldn't one just use that metal seal that goes in between the motor and trans as a template? Tape that bitch against the desired piece, use a center punch of the appropriate size for each hole, and throw that on a mill or drill press with a vice.

But how thick is this piece going to be? How are you going to get the shaft depth right?

I had always thought of this as a very cheap V8 swap idea, if you had a low power v8 and were into such things...

tim, that's awesome, thank you!

i'll see if i can clean it up a bit and re post it.

now i just need to track down the same thing for the toyota bellhousing...


this piece is probably going to be 3/8" thick steel. depending on the trans you use your shaft depth may need to be corrected with a flywheel spacer. my plan is to cut up an old flywheel on a lathe if it comes down to that. if i leave enough of the old flywheel to center on the crank, and then find a precision sleeve to press into it, the flywheel should center just fine on that sleeve.

dead thread revival...

after TurboTim was kind enough to make this DXF for me, i was having a hell of a time getting someone to do the toyota bellhousing for a reasonable price. in the meantime i kept talking to people about this, and eventually found somone who's working on the same thing for his BPT powered 323 GTX rally car.

the best part... he works at a cnc machine shop in CA. he was able to use a CMM on the toyota bellhousing, and right now is working on combining the two patterns into a usable adapter plate! i'm just going to purchase the finished piece from him, rather than making my own. custom mounts should be no big deal, and i already have all the other parts purchased aside from a clutch disc.

almost there (i hope)!

How are you compensating for the additional bellhousing thickness when it comes to the flywheel/clutch/input shaft relationship? All things equal, just adding the adapter plate would put the input shaft that much further away from the splines of the clutch disc.

I'd pay good money for a tII adapter...or maybe even a t56 adapted. Now we're talking!!!

Anyone have a t56 template...I can make one with that and tim's awesome .dxf.

Turning tim's into a cleaned up .dwg right now so I can feed it into MasterCAD for the waterjet later.

I'm seriously considering skipping the Torsen route and using the Lincoln LS rear end to be ready for LSx power later. Using a t56 tranny as well would be a no brainer if I could get away with not making a custom interim driveshaft and use the whole kit. Would depend on where the spacer-tranny mating plane ends up in relation to the V8 installs.

I will do one custom driveshaft during the life of this car, but two would be stupid.


EDIT: Quick search netted some files in post #4 here:

http://forums.turbobricks.com/showthread.php?t=142381

Will have to check to make sure it's what we're really looking for...I've never even seen a t56 in person.

NEVERMIND....THAT'S A FORD T5

In all the reading I've done, I've found a handful of people who have done this to their 323 GTX/GTR's down in Australia and new Zealand. There's a smaller handful who have done it FWD, but it is essentially the same conversion minus the whole issue of the driveshaft, mounting the rear diff, clearancing the oil pan for the rear transfer, etc. None of them has mentioned a single thing about a flywheel spacer.

I wont know for sure until I get the plate and try to bolt things up, but I'm guessing that the BP flywheel must be thicker than the 3SGTE flywheel or something... so the height ends up being about right. Either that or the input shaft is longer than it "needs to be" for its stock application.

Regardless, I do have a plan in case I need to space it out. I will lathe the center out of an old flywheel, retaining the "lip" that centers it on the end of the crank. Then I can center it on the pilot bearing hole and precision lathe the front side of this piece down small enough to fit snugly inside the "lip" of my actual flywheel. I'll need longer/stronger flywheel bolts, but it should be thick enough to take up the space.

I just want a strong 5-speed or a 6-speed with realistic rations. Unfortunately my 3.63 is junk so I have to figure out something else.

I just KNOW I'll end up with an LSx in this car one day. If my turbo install was nicer/more powerful I might not, but it's just an interim power boost.

Everytime I see a "deal" on a Torsen I just think about how I'd sell it a few years down the road, and I have a buddy that's about to part out a Lincoln LS anyhow.

Trying to give myself an upgrade path. Mating a B series to a t56 may be a stretch though.

The toyota tranny idea sounds like a good one though, atleast for the FWD crowd.

this toyota transmission is unbelievably beefy... normally i can bench press the mazda trannies up into the car, while someone up top "aims" it onto the motor. ...i think i'm going to need to buy a transmission jack to get this thing in and out. i havent weighed the whole thing yet, but the LSD w/ring gear that i just bought weighs 30 pounds...

Worst case you have a flywheel built/cut to your specs. Go with an aluminum piece and you'll have something you can use forever with a replaceable mating surface. That looks like my solution for doing an entire bolt up of the TII trans to the FE using a Bongo van bell. Mazda did make the rwd R trans with a long enough shaft to do an entire bolt up, but the trans has suck ratios and only made it to the other side of the globe. Hard to justify when I got two TII trans for free (one bad for mockup, and one good).

i figured if i made the little "spacer" i described above, i could simply re-use it with another stock flywheel if my current one ever wore out too much.

i think a custom flywheel would be out of my price range, and aluminum isn't ideal as the car's main purpose (aside from a street car) is the occasional pass at the drag strip..

At that point you maybe able to just get someone to sell/mail you the input shaft of the longer R. That way you could swap out the shorter input shaft and still have the better gearing. I know when the N/A Rx7 guys swap to the miata intergearing they have to swap the inputs shafts due to length.

Splitime has a TII adapter plate, maybe he could send to someone to get it made into a file?

So in to make whatever do whatever it needs to if drawings are available. I can have stuff CMM'd but it takes a while.

I could do it, and maybe spit out a few in 1/2" mild. Anything else we'd have to special order.

Guess I'll have to hit my buddy up for the details. We put a VW TDI (1.9l) on a supra 5 speed for a vovlo project and it worked flawlessly, what I don't remember is what we did for the shaft length. I'll see if I can get some info.

Interestingly, he just put a T5 in another volvo, rebuilt it and said it was a snap.



Huh, only useful pic I found:
http://abefm.smugmug.com/photos/150450589_PpbS8-M.jpg
and it wasn't that useful.

A large enough flatbed scanner is a quick way to make a template of something. :-)

I got a Faro arm at work, that's what I used on the miata trans. I could do another trans...or I have plenty of LS blocks and small block ford blocks at work, I could faro the bell housing flange of each...would that help? We probably have any american V8 block...except a small block chevy (a big joke at work).

I don't mind doing that... but I'd kinda want to have it sold before I have knockoffs of it made.

No offense guys...

ACME ADAPTERS Suzuki Samurai Turbo Diesel

I guess this is where the output shaft adapter came from, though the plate we made ourselves with a cheapy harbor freight plasma cutter and some wooden guides we made on a bandsaw.

The "Ford T5" isn't a bad option. This has been on my wanted list for years now. Many a T5 has lasted some serious abuse and MUCH more power than our little rubber bands could ever muster. They're readily available, very inexpensive, and available in MANY different gear ratios. I have 3 sitting in my shed right now.

T5s sell for 200$. T56's sell for 800 - 2000$ used I've seen. You can get an aftermarket Tremec branded TKO-600 which will hold 600+ # of torque. You can order a TKO straight out of jegs for less than 2000$ shipped IIRC, or buy a Tremec 3550 from a mustang owner for < 500$ used. I've seen straight cut gear sets, syncrodelete conversions, all sorts of goofy crazy shit.

Two HUGE HUGE advantages of the T series tremec style transmissions is unlike OUR unit the bellhousing is a separable piece. To compensate for extra added thickness of an adapter plate, just take the bell housing and cut off the engine side of the plate. Machine up a new engine mount for it, tig it on. The T5's input shaft is a 10 spline and is larger than ours, so a new one would have to be fabricated or a 10 spline clutch disk would need to be made, then have the shaft turned down slightly. Most T5s used cable clutch release, but specifically the bellhousing for the Ford Thunderbird TurboCoupe used a hydraulic slave cylinder and fork similar to our factory unit.

Also available in later model mustangs and not as durable is the T45. I'd stay away from these simply because they're just not as strong. Seriously doubt we'd break ANY of them though.

Borg Warner T5:
http://www.britishv8.org/Articles/Im...smission-A.jpg
http://www.britishv8.org/Articles/Im...smission-B.jpg

Tremec 3550:
http://www.britishv8.org/Articles/Im...smission-A.jpg
http://www.britishv8.org/Articles/Im...smission-B.jpg

Borg Warner T56:

http://www.britishv8.org/Articles/Im...smission-A.jpg
http://www.britishv8.org/Articles/Im...smission-B.jpg

The T56 might be a little harder to stuff in a miata 4 cylinder due to space requirements, but I've honestly never really measured them up side by side. There is really little difference between a Ford, Chevy, or Chrysler T56. IRRC there were two manufactures, Tremec made a few but more commonly was the Borg Warner. They're pretty stout transmissions, but you have to take care of them. Missing 1-2 shifts too many times will pretty well trash it. I've seen more than one F-Body person miss shifts too many times, overshift with improperly adjusted shift stops on aftermarket shifters, etc. Bends the shift forks pretty easily and requires a rebuild eventually. If you take your time and shift properly but swiftly you'll have very little problem with them.

One last thing that just came into mind. All of the above will require driveshaft modifications, and since our u-joints aren't user serviceable much like upper ball joints, you'll need output yolk from the ford unit, have it welded onto the end of your shaft, maybe cut down, whatever differential provisions on the other end. I know a good local driveline shop here in Kansas City Missouri who does EXCELLENT work if anyone needs a place to send theirs to. Took them a shaft, measurements, and what yolks were needed. They cut it down to length, welded on new ends, new u-joints, balanced it.. 135$. Took 3 days.

Just my random input to the transmission thread, sorry it has nothing to do with FWD application OP...

no problem, the fwd topic is a little OT for this forum anyway :)

the last time i heard from "the guy making the plate", he said he should be finished sometime this weekend.... i've got my fingers crossed that i'll hear from him soon, and that he will be shipping this week!

custom clutch came in yesterday...

1800# pressure plate, 6 puck disc 225mm w/ toyota 21 spline sprung center hub

Attachment 204190

more delays...

Apparently the drawing that TurboTim made with his faro arm a few months ago is somehow too far off to use. The machinist making my adapter cut a test piece on his CNC based on that pattern, and the crank centerline was off by 0.073". The bolt pattern on the oil pan section of the bellhousing is also slightly different between FWD/AWD and RWD, which i didnt realize.

Anyway, he had his BP pattern scanned on a CMM table and using that new pattern made up a sample adapter... close but no cigar, the crank centerline was still off by 0.010". He is making some final adjustments and should be finished soon. :)

I know this is an old thread but the files is no longer hosted it seems. I would like a copy of this file and I could host it if needed.

Regards,

Miguel

I looked at my Faro data, and if you draw a line between the dowel pins and set that as your "X" axis reference, the throwout bearing sleeve surface (the origin in my model as the inputshaft had a lot of play radially) is ~.076 below that line and ~.006 from the center of the line horizontally. Also in my Faro model is the output shaft and that's inline with the origin. Also, both dowel pins and the bearing surface were measured twice, once to orient the solidworks coordinate system, the second time to add the geometry to the sketch. The above dimensions are within .0006" comparing the two sketches. Perhaps the dowel pins were measured off, both times the same amount basically, or your machinist is wrong, or the throwout bearing sleeve thing isn't concentric with the input shaft/crank shaft, but they why would the trans output shaft be concentric with the bearing sleeve? I can't tell unless I Faro my old BP (which is the right way to do it), but I won't transport that to work for no good reason.

Clairetoo used my .dxf when she did her KL to miata trans adapter. That works great. :dunno: Sorry it didn't work out for you!


If you want to risk using my perhaps incorrect .dxf, PM me your email address, or email me. You can find my email address if you try.

another dead thread revival is the BP bellhousing dxf still around? I'd love to get a copy

Oh yea me too lol