Installing the

New 40mm Pro-Drive Secondary Unit

in our ship

January 18, 2005

 John Spurling called us with some great news today.  Not only was our new secondary unit ready but Terry Everhart was going to personally deliver it to us on his way back home to Florida.

Terry arrived in Knoxville Friday with a large heavy box in hand and we got our first look at our new secondary unit.  After playing catch up with each other for a couple of hours Terry departed our frozen city for the sunny Florida coast.

Thanx Terry!

I asked John Spurling about this allan screw

and he said it was for installing a grease fitting later on when we hit the 500 hour mark on our secondary unit and that we could if we wanted to also use it to attatch our bearing temperature sensor.  John said that having a bearing temp gauge hooked up to this spherical bearing setup is just about useless because it won't give us any advanced warning of a problem like the previous 3 and 2 bearing units of the past were supposed to.

January 24, 2005

Today was the day and a long one to let me tell you lol.

Installing this drive was something we took pretty serious. We spent alot more time pondering than we did actually working on it, well pondering and calling John Spurling about 2000 times lol.

The drive itself is pretty simple to install once you figure out the magic trick of getting it into the frame.  We made about 4 long attempts at it and it just didn't want to go.  All of a sudden on attempt #5 it just fell into place like it was made for it.  It brought back memories of that imfamous Rubik's Cube puzzle thingie lol.

Anyways once that part was over it was onto setting it all into place which was pretty easy to do since it wasn't a totally new installation.

With the unit in position with the top pillar block bolts slid in temporarilly
to hold it up and with the aluminum shim stock in place

we put the lower bearing mount bracket on with the original shims.

Next with the cog belt in place around the shaft we slid the small sprocket onto the shaft then

using the tensioner / spreader unit that came with our original cog belt system we set just a touch more pressure on the cog belt then we figured we would need so we could get the shims inbetween the the square drive tube and the piller block of the secondary.

After that we figured out the amount of shims we would need at the top of the unit and slid them into place.

This new 40mm secondary setup got rid of 1/8 inch shim on our ship
because it fits closer to the square drive tube which on a good note translates into loosing some weight.  The reason for that is the center of the shaft hasn't moved but since the diameter of the shaft has been increased to 40mm, Pro-Drive had to down size the pillar block in the forward area in order to make it fit.

After we made sure every thing was aligned
to the main shaft cog belt sprocket we tightened the piller block down.

Next we checked the tension of our cog belt

 
which is now 5/16"  belt tension

at the 74 degree ambient temperature of our workshop.

Pro-Drive

Cog Belt Tensions

Belt Deflection	Tension	Ambient Temperature
Minimum Tension 7/16" of an inch	10 lbs.	70 Degrees
Maximum Tension 1/4" of an inch	10 lbs.	70 Degrees

Next we finished torquing down the small cog belt sprocket.

This takes what seeems to be forever to do. It's done in a pattern going around and around it until each bolt torques to 10lbs.

John Spurling at Pro-Drive also said once the ship is hovered for an hour or so to be sure to go over it again.

Re-Torqued 3/12/05

None of the screws tightened up more then a smidge if anything at all.

January 25, 2005

These are shots of the lower bearing and pulleys
which at this point are loctited into place after the final installation.

We asked John whether to use Red or green loctite and
his reply was you could use either one but green was the preferred one so we goobered it with the green stuff.

The brand and type of loctite we used our shaft parts

Permatex 29000 Penetrating Grade Threadlocker GREEN Automotive Grade

John Says,
It's very importent
Not TO USE
Blue
Loctite

because it doen't have much holding strength.  In this application the temps of the secondary shaft will get very warm especially in hot weather and blue will completely loose all of the little holding strength it had.

All finished and ready to go onto the next steps,

Installing the fan, radiator and shroud assembly

Next was shifting the secondary over to center the fan in the cooling shroud

Next was Tensioning the main drive belts

and checking the tension on our Pro-Drive electric clutch spring tube.

 
With the clutch engaged
we set our belt tension to
5/16 of an inch at 10 lbs. pressure

The ranges of tensions

with the Pro-Drive Main Belts engaged are

Minimum Tension	7/16"
Medium Tension	3/8"
Maximum Tension	5/16"

3/8 " being the middle of the road would be the ideal tention

Next was checking the stroke of the Pro-Drive Electric Clutch Spring Tube.

With the clutch engaged it has

1 - 3/16  inch of tension

which is between the minimum and medium setting so we're good to go

Pro-Drive Electric Clutch Spring tube ranges of Tensions

Mininum Tensoin	1 - 1/8"
Medium Tension	1 - 1/4"
Maximum Tension	1 - 3/8"
ALLOWED ONLY ON BRAND NEW BELTS	1 - 1/2"

1 - 1/4" being the middle of the road would be the ideal tension

Swing Arm / Idler pully

If the swing arm was installed any lower we would have had to raise it up, if you look closely at the pictures you can see it just barely has clearence so we lucked out and we're good to go.

Next was adjusting the engine height

We need to move our engine up
about 1/8 of an inch or 1.25 thousands in tech head talk.

That will require jacking up the engine and removing a shim from the bottom engine mount.  We're not sure if our hard landing caused this or if the new secondary is taller or our engine has just sank into the rubber O Ring a little further over time.  I spoke with John Spurling about this and he said it was common for the engines to settle about an 1/8 of an inch by the time they reach 80 to 100 hours so from what I understand the hard landing we had didn't have a thing to do with it being lower.

In this picture you can see how close the oil return fitting
on the bottom ot the cyclinder head is to the frame.

When were finished it will be 1/8 (125 thousands) of an inch higher.

The final out come of our engine height alignment
set to
.200 thousands below the top of the Engine Pully

Installing the alternator / water pump belt

-	Rotorway Part Number	Manufacturer Part Number
Alternator / Water pump belt	E29-1131	NAPA Premium XL 25-10403/7410

Gotta luv that Orange huh  lol.

Installing our Fan Drive Shaft

 
We got our Fan Drive Shaft painted up and remounted on the ship today but we couldn't finish installing it because
RotorWay sent us the wrong lower fan drive belt.

The good news is they may have made a change to the lower bracket on newer ships which is something that needed doing.

Anyhow the belt they sent us won't tighten up
which means it's too big for our ship so if they did make a change it won't apply to our ship.

-	Rotorway Part Number	Manufacturer Part Number	Belt Length
What we had originally is a	???	NAPA Premium XL 25-08383/7330	33 5/8 inches
A spare replacement belt we got from them a few years ago is a	E31-1130	Bando Power Ace Cog 3BX-335	33 5/8 inches
The one they sent us is a	E31-1142	NAPA Premium XL 25-7335	? inches

January 27, 2005

I talked with Mark at RotorWay today

and he said they have in fact made a mod on the lower fan drive bracket in an effort to get a better alignment for the shafts and somehow we got an updated belt by mistake.

We are going to return the one we got from RotorWay and obtain one locally here in town so we can move on with the ships repairs.

The belt we bought locally that worked on our ship

N/A

NAPA Premium XL 25-7328

33 3/8 inches

Here's what we ended up with.

It's still out of alignment like our original one was
but it's as good as it gets, so like before we'll just have to live with it.

I think I'm going to try and make some kind of an add on extension plate
that will fix this problem, it's going to add some weight but the more I look at it the more its bugs me lol.

February 3rd 2005

Fan Drive Shaft Mod

Well I couldn't handle it anymore lol,

so I made an adapter bracket out of Chrome Molly steel to strighten out our fan drive alignment.  It took me the better part of a day to complete it but I think it was worth it.

We had to cut away some of the orignal lower mount to get the shaft into center.
It could have been shifted a bit more aft but the way the bracket it's self made it wasn't possible.

First we bead blasted the bracket, then we put a coat of self etching primer on it.

Last we finished it off with a top coat of good ole Tennessee Orenge,
Its's really Chevrolet Orenge but we aren't going to tell anyone lol.

It's still got a slight tip but nothing as bad as what we had when we started so we're pretty happy with it.

The one they sent us is a

E31-1142

NAPA Premium XL 25-7335

? inches

In the end after when we finished mod we used the belt RotorWay sent us after all.

January 31st 2005

Next we reinstalled our lower Engine heat shields.

and for some reason our heat shields were to close to the RH side exhaust pipes

so we had to ajust our engine torque link to rotate our engine forward on the passengers side of the ship.

January 31st 2005

We did our final test on our Fleetguard engine coolant.

After we ran the ships engine and let it come up to tempreture and cycle the theromostate a few time we shut it down and took a sample of the coolent from the water pump air bleed port.

At this point we put the test strip into the test sample bottle for one second and then took it out and shook it off,
then we waited the required 45 seconds and within the following 30 seconds we compaired our test strip colors to the chart below

Combining steps B and C gave us

a reading of 2.8 on the chart

Reading	Levels	Outcome	Outcome
A	Freeze Point =	60% Glycol	-60 degree Fahrenhight
B	Molybdate =	600 Parts Per Million	Sends us to Row 4
C	Nitrite =	1600 Parts Per Million	Sends us to Row F

 
We started out with a 2.2 reading and now have 2.8 after adding 1/2 bottle of DCA4

2.8 = The amount of SCA Units per gallon in our cooling system

Cooling system level check on 3/12/05

It checked out right on the full mark

January 31st 2005

Next was redoing all the safty wiring of all the bolts we had to take apart for this installtion.

We still haven't safty wired our water air bleed valves

because we want to wait until we have ran the engine a few more times to make sure all the air is out of the cooling system.

March 12th 05

Engine air bleed valve

Water pump air bleed valve

Water pump air bleed valve

Radiator air bleed valve

Done 3/12/05

We completed the last of the safty wiring

UPDATE LOG BOOK

Done

Theoretically

that does it for our Pro-Drive secondary installation

and we can resume our attack on our 100 hour service procedure.

These are shots of our new 40mm
 Secondary Unit when it was waiting patiently for us to install it.

END