Whineing Fan Housing and Drag Torque Bar

31st May 2009
After nearly a year of the Drag Bar Linkage setup sitting in my garage I had to take the temporary engine out I was using as I was getting a very large wine noise from the fan housing. The engine was a single port 1300 engine which had a surprising amount of talk. Some months back I did not have time to write the dynamo failed and I had fitted my alternator from my previous engine. The problem with this was that there was not enough depth in the single port fan housing to take the fan and alternator backing plate. I presume from this there must be four different types of backing plates although I have only ever seen two. The result of this was the back of the fan was scraping on the fan housing an emitting a horrible wine. As a result of this I decided to remove the engine and at the same time fit the drag linkage kit.

The drag linkage kit fitting was described here http://martinsswbratrestoration.blogspot.com/2008/10/installing-csp-torque-bar.html

If have to add to this that the new rhino mounts that I bought to remount the gearbox where firstly not exactly what I thought they should be . The rear mounts looked very similar to the urethane ones and the front mount was missing the tab that fits into the chassis on the back of its bracket. In addition to this the rear mounts fitted extremely tightly in to the gearbox mount to a degree that made them very hard to fit. I new from fitting the gearbox that the gearbox strap was very tight to bolt into the frame arms for this propose I changed over the brackets first. The downside of this is that you cannot move the bracket to help get the mounts in. After struggling , Jacking up the gearbox etc I found a solution that worked. I used a clamp to clamp the bell housing to the bracket . This had the result of pulling the gearbox down onto the mounts . With the combination of a screwdriver in the mount bolt hole I was able to slowly tighten the clamp enough to allow the bolts to be placed in situe.

The fan housing issue in the single port 1300 engine was not so easy to resolve. I have tried the pack the front of the backing plate with small washers to push the front of the fan away from the back of the fan housing . If this fails to work I would have to find a temporary twin port engine to run in the buggy.