Free Go Kart Clutch Performance Mods | Centrifugal Clutch Upgrade

hey guys welcome to dirt gear TV today we're going to be taking a look at a go-kart centrifugal clutch system and seeing what modifications we can make to get the maximum performance out of our go-kart clutch so if this is your first time to dirt gear TV you may want to check out our video library because we've got some really cool stuff in there for example squirt our Mitsubishi Mirage powered dune buggy with a manual stick shift that was a fun project and you can watch the entire build series in our videos below now before we get into our performance clutch modifications I want to let you guys know I've got the spare 14 - that I'm going to be giving away to one of you this will fit a one-inch or to fit a 7/8 shaft it's a spare I don't need it so if any of you are in need for a new clutch here's all you have to do make sure you're a subscriber to the channel and then just leave a brief comment down below of what you'd be using this for is it for a go-kart is it for a minibike a scooter or it could just be as simple as predator engine and then I'm going to randomly select one of the comments below to send the clutch to alright now it's time to get on to our performance upgrades to our clutch now you guys may have noticed in the last video that the rascal was struggling to get up to speed just a little bit when I was in it and it had a lot of weight on it okay so here is the gearing set up for our 79 CC powered rascal cart now whenever we talk about performance on go-karts mini bikes any small project that's utilizing predator with a friction clutch in terms of performance the first thing that you're gonna want to look at is the clutch itself that's one of the biggest things when it comes to performance on these small engine vehicles so we're gonna see how we can make some free performance gains on this machine by just adjusting and changing some things within our clutching system [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] now when you take your clutch apart you're gonna have six shoes that are going to be lined up like what you see here now the first thing that I like to do with these is you're going to remove three of the clutch shoes you're going to remove the ones that are sitting over the top of this solid piece here of the back plate you don't want to remove the shoes that are over this part of the back plate where there's a gap here and what you're going to want to do is mark these and then you're just going to take a bandsaw or some other type of saw and you want to cut these pieces right down the middle in half now what I like to do is once I get these pieces cut into half I like to just take a grinder and I like to put just a tiny little bevel on the corners here so they're not too sharp because one thing you don't want is for sharp edges to get hung up on this back plate so what I did in my case before I cut these in half as I just mark these with a pencil this says to two because you want to keep those parts that are meant to be together you want to keep them together now guys there are two ways that you can increase the performance of your spring number one and what I've already done with this spring is I've actually cut a couple of loops out of this spring to increase the tension when you clip yours together stock you should be able to take the spring especially once you've trimmed down your shoes and you should be able to put your spring easily back into and around those clutch shoes without much resistance so what I would recommend is you do this one link at a time now keep in mind guys this has already been cut down significantly I think I cut three loops out of this one so as you can see it's very difficult to get that spring into place from stock it will not be very difficult to get your spring around all of the shoes but what you want to do is you want to try to avoid cutting this thing down so far that you're having the problem that I'm having where it's very difficult to get it around all of our shoes so I probably cut this down one link to many now if for some reason you do cut this down too far and you're having trouble like I'm having trouble getting the spring back into position don't panic because you can order just these Springs by themselves which brings us to the second part of the performance of the rehear now if you really to get as much performance as you can from your stock clutch what you're gonna want to do is you're gonna want to actually order a replacement spring entirely and you can get these Springs in different stiffnesses now this particular spring this is a max Tour clutch spring this is their black spring they have these in different colors and that correlates to different rpms which these will engage in their black being the stiffest which means you're going to have a highest rpm engagement I believe the black is rated for 3200 rpm now that's going to be your highest engagement for these type of pledges you can try the black spring but I wouldn't recommend going immediately with their highest engagement clutches unless you're prepared to do some other modifications to your predator engine your clone engine because generally if you're using a stock engine they're gonna have more torque down low in the RPM band and they're not necessarily going to be turning at high rpm to engage these clutches so you may want to start with a lower engagement clutch and work your way up to the black spring if necessary as you add performance upgrades to your engine I do intend on doing all of the performance upgrades to wear a little 79 CC predator so I'm gonna go immediately with the black spring and we're gonna get this down into place even though this spring wants to pop all these shoes loose there's quite a bit of play that still left inside this that's a good indication that you can take a length or two out of your spring to get it down to a better tighter fit so we're gonna take a little bit out of this thing and again you can do this with your stock spring if you want to do a free modification everything that I'm showing you can be done for free so my stock spring is a good three or four loops shorter than this length of spring here so that tells me I've got a little ways to go where I can take this thing down and it can start with one if you really want to be cautious but I'm gonna go with two because I know already about how much length I need okay so this is probably going to be as far as I want to go with this black spring you can see it's about one loop longer than what the spring is the stock spring that I trimmed down and because I know this stock spring is really hard to get into position I'm gonna leave this thing a little extra long if you're cutting it down just make sure that your loops are closed enough so you should have one that's slightly open don't trim the open side I always recommend you trim the closed side so that way you can pinch down the closed side and you know that you're not cutting it in a way that it's going to come apart let's see if we can get this thing into position here like not completely confident but we're going to try our best [Music] there is no slop there's no play right now I'm putting tension on all of these clutch shoes and I can feel there's just a little bit of resistance from that spring that's exactly what you want that's a perfect length of spring when you've got no slop see I can't move these shoes whatsoever but at the same time they're not completely busting out the minute I take my hand off it that's exactly what I'm talking about frustrating so let's go find that shoe so that's exactly why you want to make sure that you're not cutting these Springs down too far it may take one or two tries here but we will get it and really the best thing to do would be to maybe get a screwdriver underneath here you want to get your top plate in compress the one side of the top plate and get ready to pinch this thing down and get your hand out very quickly if you can do that quick like that it should come together without this thing coming apart on you what I like to do is get the one side of the clip under first and then just work your way around with us we're just gonna give that a tap the other thing that you can do is if you have a socket or some type of round tubing or something that you can fit around this what you can do is put this on a hard surface and drop that tubing and whack the tubing and this thing will all come together real easy so once you've got your clip back on basically you're just gonna do everything in Reverse and reassemble one thing I want to do while we've got this apart is there's a little bit of material that's coming off of the interior of this clutch bellhousing you can use sand paper you can use steel wool but I just want to go through and clean up the inside of this just ever slightly this is just some hundred grit you can use 220 but you just want to go through and you want to clean up any contamination on the inside of the bell housing this has already been done but you just want to touch it up a little bit you're not sanding the surfaces you just want to remove any contamination that might be on the inside of your bell housing with a little bit of sandpaper then what I did is I use some mineral spirits another that's really good to use would be naphtha I just took our steel wool here and I cleaned up the inside of the bell housing and then I did the same process just lightly cleaned up any contamination that might be on our clutch shoes and then last and final was to take our mineral spirits and to just make sure that we're cleaning up any grease and grime anything that could possibly have contaminated our shoes or a belt housing I mean it could have been something that happened during the manufacturer of the product somebody handled it with greasy fingers shipping you don't know what's been done to this so it's always a good idea just when you've got this apart to make sure that your two contact surfaces are as clean as they can possibly be these don't have ball bearings it just rides on this brass bushing that you see inside here so use some high quality oil and that bushing will absorb some of this oil I like to get a little bit on both surfaces just be really careful when you're oiling this guy's the last thing that you want to do is get any oil on the inside of this bell housing because that's where your contact surface is and you want to make sure you're not over oiling this so it slings oil that would also be detrimental to the performance nice thin layer on the inside there we're going to drop our shim back into place and then of course just drop our bell housing back on there a second clip back on here there it goes and that's it now in my case when I put the clip on there was a little bit of resistance and when you're done putting this together you really want to make sure that that clutch bell housing is free from any binding now if I take the shim out entirely I've got some wiggle on that bell housing so I don't want to remove it now what I'm going to do is just take our shim and I've got some 220 sandpaper you can use two twenty or a little bit finer to smooth it down I want to remove just a fraction I will have only taken this thing down just a few thousandths okay we've taken all our anodization off some type of lubricant oil a very light fine layer of grease that's what this is you just want to make sure that you're keeping friction down on any contact surfaces we'll drop that bellhousing back on make sure that your clip that's fully seated and then check it this is much better than it was and you can't even hear it but there is just ever so slightly some space in there before when I was turning this you could hear it grinding because there was pressure being put on that shim so make sure that your clutch is nice and clean and now it's just ready for installation and performance testing [Music] [Music] you can have the most powerful motor in the world or engine system but if you have points of friction that friction in your drive system is constantly robbing whatever power you have we probably only have three and a half horsepower to work with which is why I'm so meticulous to make sure that this is an entirely friction-free system because those little points of friction whether it be on the chain the axle the drivetrain the clutch itself that's all robbing and that's gonna steal from the total power that we have so let's fire this thing up and see if that made a difference or not [Music] [Music] now if you've watched the video on our RC powered rascal scooter here you may have noticed that at idle previously during the test runs the scooter was wanting to constantly pull forward even at a low rpm and that's because that clutch was trying to engage too early it was causing friction and this problem not only robs you of performance but it actually destroys your clutch because that constant pulling forward motion is now applying a tremendous amount of heat to your clutch bell housing and it's gonna prematurely where it's going to cause problems with you know grip and acceleration and it's just gonna rob the system of performance now guys if you haven't seen our complete radio-controlled rascal kart build you're gonna want to go back to the previous video and check that one out because you'll see how I built this RC powered rascal scooter and that's where you'll get to see the actual test drive now in the next video we're going to be digging into the 79 CC predator engine we're gonna put the absolute best performance mods that we can on this small engine system and get the maximum power that we can of performance from this small system so if you're not already a subscriber make sure that you're subscribing now to the channel so that way if you have a small powered engine project you know exactly what you need to do to gain the maximum performance from your system so guys don't forget to leave your comments below if you would like to win the free clutch here and we'll get the shipped out to you soon after I select a winner thanks for watching and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: DirtGearTv

Views: 55,339

Keywords: go kart clutch, mini bike clutch, predator 212 clutch, centrifugal clutch go kart, go kart mods, max torque clutch, go kart upgrade, 79cc clutch

Id: cN9tBNW-Trg

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2020