maico clutch springs and wheelsmith coil spring

[kristan]

Hi all,
have come across an interesting quandry! i recently rebuilt the gear box on my 78 440 magnum and managed to squash a few of the disc springs for the clutch on assambly. Great i thought, this is an excuse to get one of those new wheelsmith coil spring type fandango things!
so all goes well till i try to assemble the thing as before. cant get the compression on the spring to get the retaining clip in. so i go back to square one and make sure i havent done any thing stupid (whel no more than normal) Still cant see a reason so decide to take the extra steel plate out of the stack. Bingo se goes together a treat and the action feels great.
Time ticks past before i get to give her a run. The day finaly comes and much to my dissmay i find that the clutch slips! Crap!!!
so i pull it appart again for some more head scratching. after lots of measurements, dissasembly, reasembly and phone calls i am still none the wiser. After sleeping on it and mulling it over at work i decide to compare the disc springs against the coil spring. first i measure the free length of both. They are both comparable at 28mm and 28.3. next i check the fully compressed length, this is where it got interesting! the coil spring compresses by 6.5 mm but the disc spring stack compressed by 9mm! this would mean that the clutch would be able to be assembled with the disc springs but not the coil spring.
I am yet to recieve the replacement disc springs but it looks promising. hopefully there will be no slip now!

my question is has anybody had a similar problem?

cheers
Kris

[Maicojames]

Kris, some here in US are running that spring-most on the "big" clutch. Your Magnum has the small clutch of course. I don't know of anyone running one in a small clutch right now. Not sure if that is the difference or what it is. Recently, I have become aware of more variations in overall stack heights than I was aware of-though most of these occur in the 68-73 year range.

You may want to contact your supplier ( I think it would be Mainly Maico ?)-and see if there have been any other issues. From your measurements, I do not see how it could be compressed enough to fit.

[firko]

I tried one a few years ago on my small clutched 440 and couldn't get it to work as well as the bellville washer setup (slipped like buggerey). I figured I was doing something wrong and threw it in the 'failed experiments' box. Wheelsmith didn't always get it right.

[kristan]

hmm, sounds like i am on the right track then! just waiting for my new disc washers to arive, so will know for sure when i get it back together.
glad its not just me that has had issues with this then!

[flyingdg]

Hi

I have a real wheelsmith spring and it is 27.98mm long and compressed it is 20.41mm. The new spring that is being sold was made by AMS in AZ. I have never tryed the wheelsmith spring out, i need to and when i do i will post on how it worked. I run a 81 490 clutch in my 73 400 and i got some new plates from NW Maico & CZ that are kevlar and it is the best clutch that i have seen in a maico. DG