1946 Studebaker rear main seal adaptation from a Chrysler

Here you can see the rear main bearing half lip seal. This has been a problem because after extensive searching we could not find the right one even in the US. Finally the owner tracked this Chrysler item down and with a little alteration and mandrel tooling we managed to fit this, allow it to progressively settle under a load and trimmed to give an initial large nip as with shell bearings and then after further time under load and with use of a mandrel made to crank journal size, we finally carefully shaved and oilstoned the seal joint face to give a nominal 0.004" nip.

 

Above you can see the seal before initial trimming.

                            Here we are using feeler gauges and micrometer blue to gauge the contact of thr lip to see its position and the amount it grips the feeler gauge. Access is tricky throughout.

Supercharger Adaptation Continued.

 Some more Supercharger drive over the last two weeks.

All very time consuming as the clock races as if supercharged toward Christmas!

Lots of Supercharger work in the second half of this year...

Earlier this year and a little through last year, you will see posts of the previous supercharger modifications to adapt to the Wolseley Hornet. However, we had a puzzling problem with clearances in use. It finally became clear that despite lathe runs to test the balance the actual engine run up sessions finally indicated that something had broken up inside one of the rotors causing internal bruising which gave spot clearance issues (see bottom photo of this post). Now we have made parts to adapt another type of supercharger to accept the long nose section, we have to keep every dimension under tight control as we do not want to alter the tightly fitting bonnet. Of course as soon as you alter one thing then a whole load of other parts require attention further down the line!

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