Clutch Talk!

we're going to be talking about our clutch assembly today and we run a black magic clutch and there are three main parts to it so it's got a flywheel it has the friction disc and it also has the clutch cover it also has smaller main components to it which have which are the base pressure springs and the the levers yeah and we're gonna we're basically setting our clutch up right now this clutch is already has already been run in this car it just got back from a freshen up from black magic so basically the flywheel right here here let me get around all right so the flywheel right here and the flywheel has some steel pucks on it that's what the friction disc rides on there's also the same type of pucks and they are they're right there i don't know if you can see them or not but they're right here so sandwiched in between those is the friction disc we run a it's a uh iron disk so it's it's actually meant to slip and these clutches are really tunable because you can set the brace pressure and uh like autumn mentioned the base pressure is these springs so this spring right here you can adjust the pressure essentially you can run that spring up and down that sets how much pressure this clutch has just static it's uh like if you're you can have so little pressure on this thing that if you're just idling around and you give it a little throttle it'll slip um this clutch is designed to work with counterweight and like autumn said the levers are another smaller but still main component of this clutch the levers are where your throw bearing let's see if i can find it okay here's the throat bearing so throw up bearing sits right here and your clutch linkage would come in and it would force this down and when it forces that down it unlocks the disc so that way the car doesn't continue to move when you have the clutch depressed so we run a little bit of base pressure and how you change the base pressure is you can see you go counterclockwise to add plus so you basically would get this thing just to where it's touching the spring and then however many turns you want to run base pressure um that's what you do so that would be a half a turn one turn uh we last year we ran four and a half turns of base and we ran 20 grams of counter now this is the counter it's on the opposite end of the lever you can see here it has no weight on it and this thing right here you add weight right now this has 30 grams 10 grand two 10 gram pucks and the nut in the bowl is 10 grams so it's got 30 total so you'd have three arms 60 grams total on this clutch and uh the higher the rpm the more this will add pressure so for every thousand rpms it adds 100 let's say 100 pounds so the more weight you have here the more the clamp load is on the disc at any given higher rpm so uh you know what do you autumn like when you let the clutch out you can clearly feel the clutch slip yeah when there's less bass or less counter and when you you know this car we've been leaving the line at about 6200 we're gonna lower that this year to around 5500 that's why we're going from 20 to 30 grams we want about the same amount of total pressure basin counter when the car launches as uh as it has a 6200 so we add 10 grams so at 55 it essentially has the same amount of uh total pressure on the disc and and then you can you know you when you're at the track you can change all that the bell housing it has a window in the bottom so you pull these bolts out pull that cover off and that will right down here at the bottom it exposes these weights and you can just pull this apart and add or subtract weights as you need to whether it be because you want to change the way the car runs or reacts or the tracks not as good and you want to soften the clutch a little bit you could also do the same thing by lowering those starting line rpm our launch rpm but sometimes doing that puts the engine somewhere sort of where it's unhappy so sometimes you gotta sometimes you get a hold on sometimes you there's a couple different ways you can you can approach this but these clutches typically have a real light pedal like when autumn pushes the pedal down in the car like normally you'd have a you know normally the the pedal on a clutch is fairly stiff these things i mean they're like nothing yeah it's really soft but that's base pressure well the mustang that i learned in i couldn't push the clutch down unless i hoisted myself up by the steering wheel yeah that was now that would turn the steering wheel yeah that was a clutch that was a cable in that car that was a mustang with a cable clutch and i think the cable was bad we bought this thing just to take it at the track and drag race it with a stick shift so uh so the kids could learn but uh yeah that thing if you could drag race that stick shift car you could drag race anything um this one is is really easy it's really easy and you can let it out really easy and you can feel when it starts to grab and if you don't let it out when it starts to grab you can kind of feel it slipping but it'll still yeah it'll still go yeah and we had a couple incidents last year where we slipped the clutch pretty bad basically doing burnouts slip the clutch doing a burnout real bad but the one thing about this these discs is the discs have a you can buy discs that have different coefficient of friction so some discs are just more aggressive and they are meant to hold more power slip less at any given clamp load so you can really do a lot of tailoring to what you want but as the heat increases in the disc the coefficient of friction also increases so the hotter this thing is like it gets really grabby when it's hot so there there was a few times last year we were kind of struggling to do burnouts because we were trying to really choose the correct uh rpm to do a burnout at and there was a couple times where it wouldn't yeah it'd be at like 5000 rpms and the back tires aren't spinning at all it's just slipping the disc but once that that breaks free it'll spin yeah it it but getting it to break for you was what yeah if you give up within about a second um it won't it'll never spin the tire but if you let it sit there for one second it the disc will will get hot enough to where it'll start getting it it'll grab harder so well i mean it just the disc is the hotter it is the more it grabs so if you if it's sitting there slipping it is getting really hot really fast so if it slips for it seems like a seems like 10 minutes when it's not spinning the tires but as soon as that thing gets heated up if you stick with it it will spin the tires trust me and we figured that out because you would you i'd tell you to stop stop stop you told me to quit and as soon as i quit the tires would start spinning and you were like yep retry but we were uh last season was really a learning learning learning curve for us with with this clutch and this car and another thing is is that this car doesn't have a lot of power i mean it's it was probably at the very most 450 horsepower but that's a great you know nobody's nobody's yeah nobody's dying in a 450 horsepower car unless they're just driving it into something deliberately so it's a great place to start um the clutches are they seem very intimidating but they're not if you just break it down they're very simple and now we had another brand clutch in this car and it it it was it was a pile it just didn't it didn't run right now i'm not going to say what it is i don't want to say what it is on camera because we bought it we bought it used we bought the car with that clutch and we just had problems with it so it may not have been also us not knowing everything that we well listen i i you know i kind of know you know i was okay about getting them to work i just had no luck with that clutch we put this clutch in it clutch is a lot easier and the the the manufacturer of this clutch told me ask me how much the car weight and how much horsepower it had and said dude do this and this this much base and this much counter and we took it straight to the track and it went right down the track we we had we did end up doing some different things with it um what after it got broken we need we we changed the base and whatever for what we thought were okay and uh but yeah this this thing is is money i would honestly i would never have an organic or ceramic type disc in a street car ever this kind of clutch right here would run in a street car with no problems it's easy on parts it's meant to slip if if you treat it properly it's i would i would never go back to a regular clutch even even in a fast street car and even though we slipped it a lot it was like it was not bad yeah we were actually worried about it because it was autumn's first year uh first full year with a stick shift and uh what was her first full year racing in a big car we just happened to use a stick shift and uh you know i thought that we were going to take it apart and it was going to be like a massive disaster and uh we took it apart it was it was like wow that thing is in really good shape so so it's a great question very resilient yeah so um definitely a great product yeah so autumn autumn's gonna put this this video up and honestly if anybody has any real questions um i guess you could ask in the comments i can ask i can answer a lot of questions i can also if you're interested in something like this i mean i i would rather answer the questions rather than have a a bunch of uh a bunch of you numbnuts calling people and asking them stupid questions just comment i'll answer the questions if you're that serious uh we'll get you hooked up with somebody that can get you a good unit so yeah uh great piece it's beautiful isn't it yes yeah

Channel: Stick Shift Syndicate

Views: 50

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: stick shift, race, racing, drag racing, race car, NHRA, National Hot Rod Association, nhra class racing, travel, traveling to race, stick shift racing, nhra divisional, clutch car, engine, performance racing, chevy, chevrolet, nova, chevy nova, small block engine, 350 small block engine

Id: raVkwif2ofs

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021