Good news for my four speed brethren!!!

So, I have been in contact with Ram because I want a Long style clutch setup, but I can't fit a 143t flywheel in my new Quicktime bellhousing. Doug tells me "That's no problem, we happen to have finally come up with a billet 130t flywheel that will hold an 11" Long style pressure plate." I tell him that I didn't see it in their catalogue listing. He says it was just released a short while ago, there isn't even a part number for it yet, but they can build one for me right away. One new, shiny, plastic credit card later, I ordered an 8 bolt billet aluminum wheel drilled for an 11" clutch setup! He tells me "Yeah, I know you Chrysler guys have been waiting a long time for this". The only down side is that they cannot discount parts like Summit, Jegs, etc. so I didn't order the clutch setup from them. He was fine with that, glad to help. Now I can use the Race Long plate with the sintered iron disc and it will fit in my housing! I'll post pics when I get it.

good deal, i ran a ram kevlar clutch about 20 yrs ago and it worked great.

You could have bought a 10.5 Long cover from McLeod. I'm not sure why the 11 disc is a huge deal.

Are you sure you don't mean a 10.95 long cover from Mcleods?

Nope. They make a 10.5 Long and even a 10 IIRC. And I don't think McLeod is the only one either.

I have been on McLeod's website. Very vague product description, leads me to believe universal coverage, pretty expensive. And besides, until their dual disc setups came out, I haven't heard too much positive stuff about them. And I've installed their dual disc setups for customers, they weren't real concerned when I ran into issues with their parts.
I have used Ram since I started racing in the late 70's and they have always been very helpful. I currently run high 9's, don't break trans parts and don't burn clutches. Working my way into the 8's. Plus now that I am in North Carolina, they are fairly local to me.

All pressure plates are universal, in the fact that if your flywheel is drilled for that particular pattern, the PP fits.


I guess we will have to agree to disagree because for years Ram had nothing to offer Chrysler guys who couldn't get a 143T FW. NOTHING except slow, parts breaking junk. You either have to slip the crap out of them, which blows the lining off, or, they hit so hard all they do is break parts. I have a friend who calls them dump truck clutches.

Most everyone I know is using some form of a sintered iron disc and adjustable PP. There is not just McLeod, Hyatt does them (I think he uses McLeod parts and probably others), Cale Aronson at Black Magic Clutches is working with Ace (IIRC) and is manufacturing a new cover that uses long fingers but not the Long cover. Advanced Clutches does some really cool stuff.

I will spend some time later today looking at what Ram is now offering. If you can get a SI disc and an adjustable cover with Long fingers that fits Chry7sler stuff, my only question is what took them so long?

I dealt with Red in the past, his customer service was second to none.

Fixed the plate that was giving me a problem and sent a replacement disc out with it too free of charge.

McLeod sells a 10.95 Pressure plate that is a Borg and Beck LONG ... Borg and Beck hat with long guts. 360950, 360951, 360952, 360953, 360954, 360955, adjustable and non adjustable , #2000 - #2700 rating , I have had one in my Dart since 2005.

I don't recognize the part numbers off hand, but I think a couple of those numbers have levers for counter weight.

I just sent my Borg & Beck/Long PP to Cale Aronson at Black Magic clutches. He updated it with billet levers (his design) and made the PP adjustable for base pressure. THat's one of the problems with this style cover...you can't get the pressure down far enough (I have at times, only run 6 springs in the cover to get it down to 800 pounds static) and make it adjustable. Cale has adjusters for this cover. With all 12 springs in (also his deal on the springs..I've had the PP looked at and no one has seen these springs before so I don't know the source) I have 510 pounds of static minimum, and I can adjust it up to 990 pounds. If you compare that to a Long cover, you can get something like 400 to 2200 of base. You just can't do that with the BB/Long cover. For what I'm doing, I should be able with a bit of counter weight, use about 650 base and the rest in counter (probably around 1200 lbs total).

I swapped RST discs to RXT discs with McLeod and they were more than helpful. They seem very interested in making sure we have what we need for what we have.

I got those numbers right off the Mc Leod site. I think in the past they were 360-95X?

Going to run a 471 Long PP and SI disc. Adjustable from 800-1640 pounds. Should work real nice. Was running a 3200 pound B&B and a paddle disc and launching at 5,000 rpm. Will take a little getting used to. Plan on launching around 4,000-4,500 rpm.

Should be faster with the SI cluch disc.

What trans are you using?

Hemi box. For now it is lugged by Liberty. Might redo it in face plate. Going to put a Passon aluminum case around it to drop some weight.

Geebus...that's pretty impressive with a crash box.

I like it.

Here's some pics of the new 130t flywheel and 143t flywheel

The new flywheel sits .600" higher. Guess I'll be playing games with the throwout bearing and clutch fork height.

Here are the flywheels sitting on the Quicktime bell. The 143t isn't even close, but the 130t fits inside nicely, even with the raised surface. Will know more when I mock up the build.

THe 143T FW takes it's own bellhousing. So you can't just interchange between the 2 FW's.

And one of the FW's on has the Long pattern in it.

Quicktime doesn't make a bell for a 143t flywheel, for Mopar anyway. Lakewood fits both, but weighs a ton and is huge. I went with the Quicktime bell to save weight. Also using aluminum flywheel as opposed to the old steel wheel I had. And I will be upgrading to a Passon aluminum housing soon, too. Both flywheels are drilled for 11" long clutch pattern. The 143t also has the standard 10.5" bolt pattern. BTW, the 143t is for sale.

Ok, now I see what they did. They increased the diameter larger than the ring gear to get the 11 inch Long pattern in there.

I would think it's going to be dang close between the bell, where it slopes down to the rear and the PP.
Glad you ditched the steel FW.

Keep us posted on how it goes. They should have made that flywheel decades ago. Would have made using an adjustable PP way easier for the Chrysler guys.



EDIT: Is the 143T FW aluminum too? If so, maybe I can hook you up with a buyer.

Let me know.

That must be why McLeod made the Combo PP ?

madscientist: Yes, it is aluminum.

johnrr: I don't know how much compromise there is in the pressure plate Mcleod makes. Seems like some sort of hybrid between B&B and Long. Not much info on their website about it either. Now, I can use anybody's 11" Long style plate and disc.

Can you post the weight of each of those?

Both the 130t and 143t in aluminum are listed as 18 pounds, but I can weigh them each tomorrow to check.

When is the car gonna be ready to make some passes Kenny?

Yup, that's why McLeod made the BB/Long cover. At one time, IIRC, you could buy that PP in an adjustable part number, but you can't any more. And that makes it a PITA to use with a sintered iron disc (the Sof-Lok system). But I did it for years.

Just this year I had Cale Aronson at Black Magic Clutches make my BB/Long PP adjustable. The issue is that the Long cover uses a much taller spring than the Borg & Beck (think installed height on a valve spring). On a Long PP you can has the base pressure adjustable from say, about 360 pounds on the low side up to about 1800 pounds on the high side. On my current BB/Long cover I have a minimum pressure of 510 and a max of 990, so I have nowhere the adjustability of the Long style PP.

The good news is I have been using this combo since 1997 and I'm fairly confident I will run about 625-650 of base pressure and about 600 pounds of counter weight at 7000 RPM and be about perfect.

I'm waiting to see if the OP can fit his 11 inch Long cover in his can w/o mods. If he can, that is the way to go for sure.

I weighed the flywheels tonight. The 143t weighs 16 pounds. The 130t weighs 19 pounds. A little different from the specs on the website, but still much lighter than the steel counterparts.

Hey Chip, aiming at spring, maybe summer. Pulled the gears out of the cardboard box in the garage. Sending them out to Liberty this week. Modifying a backup set of Hooker 3 1/2" collectors to 4". Will see which works best. Just got a set of aluminum rods from one of the members here. Going to offset grind the crank and get everything rebalanced.

Madscientist, I plan on running a Ram 471 PP which has 800 pounds base pressure and is adjustable to 1640 pounds. Ram doesn't have pressure specs at rpm, but show that this clutch setup will handle 900 hp. I should be good. Thinking of starting with a pressure setting around the middle of the road. 1200 pounds. There is always a counterweighted option, but I don't know if that is something I will need. They show that more for clutchless trannies.

Wow. I'm not sure but having only 800 pounds as a minimum makes me nervous. I only used 800 or so with no CW (just the lever with the hole in it, so it has some CW, but I didn't add any other than that). I've actually ran as low as 670 with no CW.

The good thing with that PP is you can take it to ANY good friction house (which most every major city has one) and they can change out the springs to get the minimum and maximum lower than what you have. Ram always used way more pressure than what is needed.

As an example, if you were to buy a Jerico gear box (which IMO isn't much stronget than the 833 anyway) it says EXPLICITY in the directions to never go over 1400 pounds TOTAL or the box WILL fail. So you can see, starting with 800, even with no CW (like I said, the lever itself adds some) you are going to be high on pressure.

Now that I'm thinking about it, does that PP have the lever to take counter weight? If not, send it back or have a local company add the CW lever to it.

My guess is that about 550 pounds of base and 500-600 ponds of CW (depending on RPM) is where you will end up at.

Ram makes the PP both ways. Standard CW and adjustable CW. They also have a PP with replaceable aluminum pressure ring pieces. I can get a PP with lower static pressure, this is the one they recommend for my use. I think the key here is that I plan on keeping this motor under 7,000 rpm. I don't think I need to be turning a stock block stroker higher than that. If I was shifting around 7,200-7,500, I would probably agree with you 100%. But the lower rpm range will probably require higher pressures to limit slip. I was leaving at 5,000 with the B&B plate. I plan on leaving around 4,000 with the Long plate, and shifting no higher than 6,800.

http://ramclutches.com/dragrace.html

If you are interested, I will look through my paper work and give you the exact amount of pressure I was using in a 2550 lb A body that ran 9.40's. I think it was 670 but not much more than that. The only CW was the lever. I shifted at 8500.

I then took that very same set up out of my car, and put it in my cousins mid 12 second Dart. Actually, it was an honest 12.80 car but the clutch knocked over .2 off from what he had. Eventually I has it running 12.40's with the wrong cam. It was out of cam at 1000 feet. My point is two entirely different cars and we used the same clutch. No doubt, on the 9 second car I should have dropped the base down another 150 or so, and added CW to lock it up better in high gear. On the slower car, I could have added a LITTLE CW so that at 5400 RPM it would have locked up a bit more in high gear. But at that time, I had no means of CW adjustment, or any way to change base pressure without dropping the can and taking the PP to have it dropped. I addressed that issue this year.

FWIW I think it's worth pointing out that at one time, there were 3 different sintered iron discs available. They all had different coefficent of friction. They had the high CF, the mid CF and a low CF. I never messed with anything other than the HCF discs because I wanted the disc to do the work, not plate pressure. Last time I looked (June of 2015) all I found was the HCF disc, but I only looked at McLeod. It is possible that Ram is using a disc with a different coeffiecent of friction that would require more base pressure. My thought has always been less plate pressure equals less parts breakage and a quicker ET. In fact, IIRC, when it came to the LCF disc, it was so close to a rag disc in C/F that I never could figure a reason to use it, other than you can use a little less pressure with the SI disc than a rag disc, but with the LCF it wasn't much.

I'd be interested to know which disc it is Ram is telling you to use, and if it is not the HCF, why? They may have a good reason. I'd like to know.

Since my operating range is so much lower than yours, that's probably the reason for higher static pressure. All balances out in the end. What was your launch rpm? I'm guessing a lot higher than the 4,000 rpm I plan to leave at. Ram only lists one type of disc. Doesn't get into different C/F ratings. They do make another plate they recommend for small block with much lower pressures. But this is what they recommend for my big block. They only recommend the CW plates for clutchless trannies (Save a couple of bucks on that). Still has to be easier on the trans than my B&B plates. I normally ran the 3,200 pound plate, but I have used as heavy as 3,400 pounds. What trans do you use?