"What's The Hydraulic Cylinder in This Kit For?"

The following has nothing to do with the engine build directly. It is a required however to fit the "big" single cam in place of the smaller-in-every-way D-series. I'll explain.

The normal positioning of the slave cylinder is alongside the engine block near the matting surface with the transmission bell housing. It pushes on the fork which in turn pivots inside the bell housing to push on the clutch pressure plate. You can see the slave cylinder in the image below to the right fed by the small hydraulic line. The clutch fork is covered by the squarish rubber boot to the left of the cylinder. The "torque" mount bracket is to the left of the radiator hose that divides the image. Its purpose is to counter the tendency of the engine to rock backwards under accel. and forwards under decel./engine braking. There is also a bracket of similar function but very different in appearance on the driver's side.

Looking back at the slave cylinder, notice it crosses the faintly visible joint between the transmission and the engine (to help you find it: the brass-looking bolt head holds the two together). This becomes a problem when the wider block and adapter plate are fitted. The guys at Bisimoto Engineering discovered this for themselves and so included a pull-type rather than push-type slave cylinder in their kit. Sadly, for those only interested in bolt-on kits this is all they included. It's left to the installer/fabricator to sort out the rest. Not such sad news for a tinkerer/engineer-er like me!

So the issues at hand are 1) no existing mount for the new cylinder 2) rigid clutch hard-line where flex line is needed 3) a mount bracket occupying the ideal space for the new cylinder. To solve #1 and #3 simultaneously I plan to modify the bracket with a little "snipping" and "zapping" to turn it into a dual purpose torque bracket/slave cylinder bracket. I'll have to change out at least one, maybe all three bolts to accomplish that. I've got a few more tricks up my sleeve for that as well... #2 is where this gets really ambitious. The hard line zig-zags across the top of the transmission where, held steady by a bracket it meets a flexible rubber hose that makes the jump from the transmission to the firewall and a second hard line that snakes along the firewall to the master cylinder.

(follow the blue arrows)

To use any of this I would at least need a bracket to hold the loose end of the transmission hard line then a length of flex feeding back to the new slave cylinder. This would look sloppy and take up a lot of space unnecessarily. After no small amount of consideration I decided the best course of action would be to replace the entire system, essentially starting from scratch. See what I mean by ambitious?

So I need some as of yet unknown length of hard line to bend up, which I'll route down from the master cylinder, along the lower firewall and turn at the "frame rail" near the tail end of the transmission where it will meet a bracket and short length of flex line to the slave cylinder. After some "esti-measurements" I settle on 6ft of 3/16" OD metric inverted flare clutch/brake line available off the shelf at the local O'Reilly's. I found part numbers on an high-priced performance parts website then cross shopped other sites where I found it for half price, shipping included. An adapter was also needed to go from the inverted flare to the -3 AN flex line then from the -3AN flex to the 1/8NPT port on the slave cylinder.

(6ft of hard line is tough to photograph, so here's everything else)

While I'm at it I'll swap the old master cylinder for a new one so that the complete system is fresh. Modifications and install will follow in part 2 of the complete redesign of my clutch system.

Thanks for reading!