Any tips for dialing in a bell housing?

LarsD

Founding Member
Jul 2, 2002
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Texas
A friend of mine and I tried dialing in my bell housing on Sat. I don't know what the deal was, but we couldn't get it dialed. The factory dowels came in @ .025. OK, cool, I bought some .021 dowels, so that should get us to .004. Nope. By the end of the day we were seeing .190+ on the dial indicator. I must have had that bell housing on and off 100 times. I am very tempted to just put the car together and forget about it. We read various articles on the process, watched a few vids on youtube. According to all of them we were doing everything right.

So I examined my dial indicator setup. I found my magnetic base is not true on the bottom. I surmise this could be contributing to my wild readings I was getting. Once the magnet is energized, it hangs on, but with the indicator hanging off the end of it while spinning on the crank, who knows? So I made this:

2cdcsbq.webp


(pic is of my old engine, we were trying to dial in the bell in the car)

Once it is bolted to the crank it seems pretty stable (much better then the mag setup at least), and will hopefully produce more accurate numbers. If not, anyone ever just put a car together without dialing in a bell housing before? Did you have any problems?
 

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I dialed the Lakewood bell on my Nova several years ago. I had help from a good mechanic and it still was a PITA. We used the weld in dowels and as I recall, it involved some luck to keep them in position when finishing the weld.
 
FWIW, my engine guy checks every customers bell to thier motor before it leaves the shop. He said a couple years ago the adjustable dowels were a must, but lakewood has really fixed thier quality control and he hasnt had to use offset dowels in a while. Still worth checking though