• Hi Guest!
    You can help ensure that British Car Forum (BCF) continues to provide a great place to engage in the British car hobby! If you find BCF a beneficial community, please consider supporting our efforts with a subscription.
    There are some perks with a member upgrade!
    **Upgrade Now**
    (PS: Subscribers don't see this gawd-aweful banner
Tips
Tips

Spitfire Spit tranny upgrade pitfalls

Share this page

trrdster2000

trrdster2000

Luke Skywalker
Country flag
Offline
Several years ago I put a late Spitfire tranny in a ’74 from a ’79, I used the drive shaft from the ’79 just too put new joints in. everything bolted up fine. Last night I got talked into doing the same for a friend’s mother whom had a junk tranny in her ’74, otherwise a nice car. Pulled all the junk to get at it. Unbolted the exhaust manifold, for those not in the know, when you jack the engine up with the manifold hooked up you stand a real good chance of cracking the same, plus it will jack the car off stands and not raise the back of the engine. A little grunting and out she comes into the passenger side floor board, then slides right out, if you have taken the tray out. Replace rear seal and do a little cleaning, replace the whole clutch system with 21 spine disk to match new tranny. Here is were it got interesting. I’m the under guy, (my turn), just about getting it all lined up, tell the up guy, one more push and we are home, he say’s we still need 3 or 4 inches up here, I’m not sure how dumb the look on my face was, sure am glad he couldn’t see it. Got it slam dunked and a couple bolts in and up top to see what kind of problem we have. Didn’t take long to see the drive shaft was at least 3 inches too long. So apparently the late drive shave is shorter, and depending on who you talk to they are all the same length.
TRF shows inter changeable shafts for all 1500’s, which really confused me. We went over the car I had done years ago and the shaft was 38 inches and the one in the car we are doing is 41 ¼ inches or there about.

Anyone else had this problem, hate to get a good shaft cut down. Hope someone has a shorter shaft and hope this will help anyone wanting to do the upgrade, not have to face this problem half way through.

Thanks, Wayne
 
Well, I'm puzzled! Here's part of the chart from Canley Classics (albeit not very well formatted):

Propshaft Lengths
CAR LENGTH IMPERIAL LENGTH METRIC

Spitfire I - IV 41.25" 1.05m
Spitfire I - IV with Overdrive 38" 0.97m
Spitfire 1500 38" 0.97m
Spitfire 1500 with Overdrive 37" 0.94m
GT6 38.75" 0.99m
GT6 with Overdrive 35.25" 0.90m

I can't imagine what the problem would be...unless you have a sliding-type prop shaft and somehow pulled it all the way forward? But that would be pretty obvious. /bcforum/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/wink.gif
 
Thanks for the reply Andy.
Now I see what it should have, but how did we get 41.25 in '74 1500, when did the Mark IV stop production.
Thanks again, I hope I can find a late one.

Wayne
 
trrdster2000 said:
...but how did we get 41.25 in '74 1500, when did the Mark IV stop production.
Click to expand...
I see now that the Canley chart terminology is confusing to those of us used to the "Federal" spec. Spitfires. Here, we got the 1500, still paired with the three-rail gearbox, for 1973. But the home market didn't get the 1500 engine until 1975, at which time the single-rail gearbox was also introduced "universally."
 
Yep, I was going to ask about your transmissions, as single rail vs three rail makes all the difference in the world.
 
"Unbolted the exhaust manifold, for those not in the know, when you jack the engine up with the manifold hooked up you stand a real good chance of cracking the same, plus it will jack the car off stands and not raise the back of the engine. "

Is this true?
 
Back
Top