Square peg in round hole

As of last year, I had intended to put off the auto-manual conversion till the car was registered and running. That changed early this year when I decided to make the car much closer to my ultimate vision earlier and get the TKO in it. I'd put it off because I (typically) shied away from an unknown pathway. However, my attitude towards unknown paths changed in a fundamental way last year, and I took the plunge and ordered the TKO while the motor was out getting made awesome.

Still, it's a trial by fire. Doing something for the first time, to a fastidious standard, with no clear instructions, with combinations of parts that were made 50 years ago, designed 60 years ago, and some parts that were made just this year, is never going to be a walk in the park on a cool spring day. This week just gone, I've been working on the clutch. The clutch pedal I'm using from the '62 is, presumably, originally an American part. I don't think any of the Australian delivered cars were manual, at least none I've ever seen. The American cars have a mechanical clutch linkage system where the pedal operates on a long pin, and on the other end of that pin is a lever, above the accelerator pedal, where the linkages connect. In an aussie car, this lever is closer to the ouboard side of the car than the engine, and presumably because of this, the wagon had it's clutch master cylinder operated directly off the pedal itself, rather than the lever on the far side.

Well, true to form, that wasn't good enough for me and I decided I would put the clutch master to the outboard side of the brake booster and operate it off the lever rather than the clutch itself. It tucks neatly away behind the brake booster, out of the way, miles from anything it might interfere with on the engine.With some competent fabricating assistance, I was able to connect a rose joint via a threaded tube extension to the master cylinder pushrod and bolt it to an internally threaded standoff welded to the pedal lever. I cut the holes in the firewall, bolted everything together, and it all worked beautifully.

 
Unfortunately, I underestimated how much force would be applied to this mechanism once the fluid was added and the clutch was actually disengaging. There's so much twist and flex in the long pivot shaft, the lever, and the welded standoff that some master cylinder stroke is lost and the clutch doesn't fully disengage.

The solution will probably end up being moving the master cylinder to the inboard side of the brake booster and attaching the rose joint directly to the pedal, eliminating the flex of the pedal shaft and lever. Of course, this will mean a few unnecessary holes in the firewall on the outboard side of the brake booster, but I think I might be able to cover up this little snafu by putting the fuse box there when I do the wiring.

Frustratingly, the weekend I spent doing this ended up being wasted, at least from the perspective of progress with the car, if not from the perspective of personal experience. Still, I guess it's sometimes necessary to find out what doesn't work prior to finding what does. Nikola Tesla once remarked that he never had to resort to what he regarded as the subhuman practise of trial and error; he worked everything out in his head before he lifted a single tool. For the rest of us plebian engineers, some fuckups are to be expected.