Clutch / Torque Converter: My flywheel just lost a tooth ---Not a good day

[unclemiltie]

I just tried to start the 50 Commander to move it and it turned a little and stopped. Spend time figuring out what broke, ie ignition switch, solenoid, starter switch etc. Everything checked okay. I figured it was the starter. So I pulled it and when I hooked the battery directly it spun great. I then looked for some reason at the flywheel and see a newly broken tooth where the starter would engage. I figure maybe the tooth broke and jammed the starter, I have never had this happen on a Studebaker. Good thing is I have a new ring gear. The bad is all the work to change it. Not a good Studebaker day.

I am trying in my mind to figure out what caused this. The starter bolts were tight on the bell housing. I have had this car running multiple times over the past couple years. It is actually an easy starting car.

Anyone have any thoughts?


I guess a side benefit is I will be able to check out the clutch.

[63 R2 Hawk]

Hate it when stuff like that happens. I don't think it's a common occurance though. Probably needed a new throwout bearing anyway. Did you keep the tooth for the Tooth Fairy?

[Chucks Stude]

Put it under your pillow?

[jnormanh]

I just tried to start the 50 Commander to move it and it turned a little and stopped. Spend time figuring out what broke, ie ignition switch, solenoid, starter switch etc. Everything checked okay. I figured it was the starter. So I pulled it and when I hooked the battery directly it spun great. I then looked for some reason at the flywheel and see a newly broken tooth where the starter would engage. I figure maybe the tooth broke and jammed the starter, I have never had this happen on a Studebaker. Good thing is I have a new ring gear. The bad is all the work to change it. Not a good Studebaker day.

I am trying in my mind to figure out what caused this. The starter bolts were tight on the bell housing. I have had this car running multiple times over the past couple years. It is actually an easy starting car.

Anyone have any thoughts?


I guess a side benefit is I will be able to check out the clutch.

It doesn't have to be a big deal. A competent mechanic working under a hoist can drop the tranny, remove the clutch, and have the flywheel off in a half hour.

Another half hour to replace the ring gear, and another 45 minutes to put it all back together = two hours labor tops.

Of course you'll have to buy a new ring gear, maybe you should have the flywheel faced, and unless perfect, you should put in a complete clutch kit, or at least a clutch disk, a cheapo generic part.

Sounds like $600 to me, cheaper, by far, that the same job on a front engined rice burner.

Why did it break? You may never know. Jammed on a bit of road rock? Sixty years old?

In any case. it's well out of warranty. :-)

[unclemiltie]

Thanks, the car has 60000 on it, clutch seems ok but now I will know for sure. And yes, while in there I will replace the throw out bearing, pilot bearing and anything else that is needed. While I am sure I will whine about the job when I am doing it, I actually like working on Studebakers. I put a clutch etc in another 50 last year. As I have aged, my body now dislikes laying on the floor to do such jobs but since I recently retired, it is much better than sitting around all day. I have worked on this one for several months now and was planning on pushing it aside for a few months and working on the interior in the basement this winter.

[dean pearson]

I'm 50 now and any time you lose a tooth its a bad thing.
Lucky for you yours won't cost $1200.00 to fix.

Dean

[unclemiltie]

This morning I put the car up in the air and started working on it. First thing I did was to remove the inspection plate in the front floor at the front of the hump. While the bell housing can be removed from underneath I think this makes the job easier. As, this cover has never been off, I had to take a little chisel to remove the sound deadening tar they had covering it. I tapped on each screw with a hammer first and removed the 6 screws. I glanced at the bell housing bolts to see if I could tell if they have ever been off and could not determine.

I then slid under the car and removed the drive shaft. As this is a two piece driveshaft I had to remove not only the u bolts on the rear end and on the end of the tranny, but had to also remove the center support bolts and rubbers. I found one of the u joints had several bad needle bearings and the rubber bushings on the center support are probably original as they are like sponge rubber.

I then loosened the emerg brake cable, removed the linkage to the handle, and removed it support bracket.

Next I removed the 4 wires for the overdrive and disconnected the over drive cable. I also removed the speedo cable. It was really tight in the tranny. I also removed the transmission shift linkages.

I am now ready to pull the tranny. As I remember, the top two bolts are a challenge to get out but I will see after lunch. It is chilly here so I wanted to get warm,

When I did the clutch job on the other 50 last year, I bought a tranny jack from harbor freight. I use to lift them out and back in myself but it seems age has creeped up on me and it is not an easy chore for me any longer.

So thus far I found I will need to replace at least one u joint and maybe 2, and I will have to replace the drive shaft center support bushings. I did not hear any rear ujoint noise and it passed the shake test so I apparently caught it early. This car set in one spot undisturbed in a nice garage from 1964 till 2 years ago. Thus I expect a lot of little things like these to need replacing due to the age factor.

I thought I would share this effort here for those whom have never done a project like this.

As a side note, I have swept the floor under the car multiple times picking up all the pieces of aged grease. The ujoints had a lot of caked grease on them, telling me they have not been undone for a lot of years if ever.

Last thing I want to do is get grease on the feet and drag it in the house. Grease on the kitchen floor or worse yet in the carpet does not make for a happy wife.

[unclemiltie]

I spent the afternoon working on it also. I did not get done, I still have the pressure plate and flywheel to remove. I just lost steam. I have 7 hours into this job already. The transmission is held by four bolts and came out easy once everything was disconnected.

Then I removed the two long bolts that bolt the bell housing to the support. The four motor mounts surprisingly were not that bad. I do believe they are original I will replace all four. I was glad the inspection plate was off so I could remove the long bolts. Not sure I would have been able to remove them with the inspection plate on the car.

I then removed the cross member which is also the front body support on the 1950 cars. This took some time. There were 14 bolts to remove along with the emergency brake ubolt. I cut the ubolt as it was rusted and you have to sneak a wrench thru a little hole to undo it. Easier to cut and get a new one. This support appears to never have been off. There was undercoating, grease etc etc that had to be removed. The two body support bolts broke, the rest came undone fine.

I then worked on getting the clutch pivot pins out. This was a chore. They were rusted and not easy to get out. It is not easy to get a drive punch on the one.

I then worked on the hoard of bolts that bolt the bell housing on. The majority are bolts and nuts so you have to wrench both ends. I wish I had not already put the new exhaust system on it as the manifold pipe is somewhat in the way.

It took some gentle taps to get the bell housing to break loose even though there are no dowel pins on the commander engine like are on the champion engines.

I am tired but I should be able to get the clutch etc and flywheel off in a couple hours.

So it appears that it is around 9 hours to tear it down. Obviously if I had a lift it would have gone faster but laying on ones back tends to make things go slower.


I only have one missing tooth which I guess is good. The bendix on the starter shows very little wear.

All the bell housing bolts were very tight. So I still am not sure what caused the broken tooth. There is so much grease and dirt and wasp nests falling off it that it is impossible to determine what if anything was in the bell housing. There was one mud dobber nest in the bell housing.

[Doug Bowen]

Hey Milt...I'm 63 and over the last year or so I have replaced the entire drive line of my '64. Engine all the way through the rear end. I kept telling my wife, "heck this shouldn't take more than a week or two". Turns out that my "remembering" was 18 years old, but my "doing" was 63 years old!

It'll get done in due time.

Doug

[unclemiltie]

It only took me 30 mins to remove the clutch and flywheel. One rivet on the clutch plate was showing a little shine so this tear down is probably a good thing before it starts to slip. All signs tell me this has never been torn down. It has slightly over 60 K on it so not bad for an old studebaker. The other 50 commander I did last year has 50k on it and it was slipping.

I did find the cause of the problem. I found a bunch of teeth from a starter drive in the bottom of the bell housing. Apparently sometime in the past the drive fell apart and did the damage. It just took me two years with maybe 50 starts to find the issue. I remember folks driving cars with a missing tooth and getting out to move the flywheel when they hit the bad spot. After I got the flywheel off the missing tooth does not look recent.

Now for the ambition to put it back together. Of course now I will have to paint all the stuff I removed and degrease the 60 years of caking on the tranny.

[Blue 15G]

Thank you for sharing your experiences in fixing your '50. I am enjoying reading about the job you're doing. When I bought my '54 in 1996 it needed a clutch so I replaced it myself, and your story brings back lots of memories.

I was 42 years old when I did this, also no lift to work with like your situation. I just worked on it a litlle while each evening and while it was a lot of work, it wasn't a killer, as I recall. Now, 16 years later, I get weary just thinking of replacing something easy like a distributor cap!

Dave Bonn
'54 Champion Starliner

[RadioRoy]

I replaced the clutch in my 50 Commander some 35 years ago, when I had more enthusiasm. The shop manual recommends pulling the engine, but I did it from the bottom, like you are doing it.

In the long run, it felt like it may have been easier to pull the engine.

Good luck with your project. I would like to see some pictures of the car.

[unclemiltie]

Here is a picture when I first brought it home 2 years ago after sitting in a garage of cars since 1964. I will take another picture when I get the car going again.

[studebakerkid]

Make yourself some guide bolts before you install the tranmission. Just grab two bolts that are longer then the stock ones and grind the head off and then grind the shafts so that they have a good taper and then cut in screwdriver slots. Use these two bolts as pilots when you put the transmission in. It will make it much easier to line things up plus it helps take the weight off so that you can wiggle the input shaft through the clutch splines easier.

[unclemiltie]

Above is a picture as it sits right now. I will be putting it aside till spring. I will be working on the interior this winter.\

Studebakerkidd, I appreciate the tip on the short pilot bolts. I actually have several sets of those different lengths As those top bolts on the tranny are not the easiest to reach, those studs sure help get it installed.

I actually learned that trick from the guy that gave me this car. He was an old time mechanic and has passed a lot of that type of wisdom on to me.

Another thing he passed on to me was to used the actual input shaft from a transmission to align the clutch. I actually have the original Studebaker alignment tool and this time around I played a bit. I used the Studebaker alignment tool, a generic clutch alignment tool and the input shaft itself. By far the best alignment came from the input shaft. I used each tool and shoved the input shaft in, The shaft had a little resistance with the first two but slid right in when I used the shaft itself. While the input shaft made it easier, if you do not have one the generic tool would do just fine, you should have to shake the tranny a little more to get it to slide in

The car is drivable again.

I ended up having the flywheel turned and ring gear installed, installing a new clutch, pilot bearing, throwout bearing and one of the 3 u-joints was also bad. I also installed new rear motor mounts and center support cushions.