Both bellhousings are easy to come by. The safer is the Lakewood or McLeod style scattershield or blowproof bellhousing. These can be had on ebay used or new. Also all of the major players like Summit and Jegs sells them. You'd be looking at about $300 - $400 new, used about $150. There is also the stock style aluminum bellhousing found on cars, trucks and vans. You can find them on ebay and in wrecking yards. For street applications it's probably fine, but I like the added security of a scattershield. It's good to know that if I drop the clutch I'll still have my feet in the morning. Just something to consider.
The 10" bells that are common to 289/302s are aluminum. The 11" bell that is used on B302 and any car 351 is thick cast iron. The aluminum is super light, but the safety is an issue, along with the fact that you can only run a smaller clutch. The steel is medium weight and the safest. You can run an 11" clutch in the steel version, but it is very tight and you have to double check clearances and use offset dowels to dial them in if they are off. The steel bells also can have clearance issues with some headers and such. The iron bell is the heaviest. However it is safer than the aluminum one and far cheaper than steel. It also has no clearance issues I am aware of. I ran a Lakewood on a 351c with 2" primary headers and had all sorts of issues. When I had the iron bell on it, no issues at all. If you get a stock bell, make sure it didn't come off a truck. Car bells were all one standard depth, truck bells varied widely and you could end up not seating the nose into the crank. This is the same effect as using the FE tranny and will ruin things in short order. Most truck bells are deeper. Also, the FE tranny can be made to work without changing the front shaft. You can special order an extended crank bushing from a drivetrain shop. It is an off the shelf part, but is non-standard to Fords, so you would have to get a part number or measurements from a knowledgable source.
So this engine I just picked up came with the manual tranny bellhousing, clutch, throwout bearing, and flexplate all assembled. The housing seems to be aluminum (I have not had a chance to take the thing off and clean it) and it is a direct fit for a toploader, so I am thinking about using it when I install this engine in the car once it is rebuilt. Question: would you guys recommend purchasing a Lakewood bellhousing or keep this one? I changed the output I wanted from the engine from 350-380 to 300-320 hp. The bh I have now has no cracks, fits both the engine and tranny perfectly, and is a lot less than a new one. I am just wondering if anything unfortunate happens will the aluminum bh will keep metal inside it.
First mavmax, you need to know about me. I'm cheap...really, really cheap! I can totally understand wanting to use the aluminum bell. Heck I even moved out my shock towers because I was too cheap to buy a MII conversion. Anyhow, with that said...and the horsepower you are talking about...I would buy the scattershield. Yes, I'd probably get a used one from e-bay or a classified section of mustang site since I couldn't bring myself to spend the money on a new one. Let me tell you my experiences that led me to this. I had an 86 Nissan Pulsar back in the 90's and during street driving I dropped the clutch to get out in traffic fast. Well the clutch springs exited the center of the disk. Seemed unusual and I'd never seen that before. Luckilly nothing bad happened other than catostrophic clutch failure, but that confirmed my feeling that a scattershield was almost always needed. Several years before that I had a clutch come apart in my high horsepower street car and the disk literally exploded...now that had more power than the little Pulsar, but the shards were like knives and I wasn't even on it that hard. That one had a scattershield. And finally I have a friend that once a year races figure 8 cars (his is a four speed with a scattershield). He was stuck with bumpers hung up on two cars. Rocking it back and forth he finally broke free and went racing along (not all that fast I might add). We are guessing that after heating up the disk he had a catastrophic flywheel failure at about 4000 rpm. This thing literally destroyed EVERYTHING in sight! Broke the starter, damaged the transmission (beyond repair and he's a figure 8 guy!) and left smoldering chunks of flywheel in the dirt! The engine was still running and he couldn't understand why his transmission dropped 4 inches. After the race he could see the carnage and realize how close he came to losing a foot or his life. The scattershields design is what saved him and kept the flywheel from getting to him (even though it blew the parts out of the front cover underneath). Those three incidents both proved the worth of a shield and the knowledge that any clutch can fail. If there is a safety bellhousing available for the application I have, I will always install it...especially if I'm expecting to have a performance engine in front of it. Just my two cents and my experiences...but my well being is worth the money to me.
is there a side loader trans and is it any good?http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/1965...006QQitemZ160130440778QQrdZ1QQsspagenameZWDVW
This one (from your link) has the narrow mounting surface for a 5 bolt bell. Here is the front of a toploader that will accept the proper 6 bolt bell.
I have the narrow bolt pattern in mine. Bought it when I was young and very inexperienced. Takes alot of work to work over a later style bellhousing to fit it, new mounting holes and opening the collar in the bellhousing itself to match the trans. However, that trans has lasted me over 30 years and not been apart since I put new seals in it when I got it. Dan
The side loader as they call it is a Borg Warner T10. It is what Ford used until they invented the toploader. While it is a good transmission, it is not as tough as the toploader. However I have had them in heavy cars behind FE engines and never broke one. They are prone to syncros wearing out which makes them jump out of gear, especially when down shifting.
so what is the differance in the side loader and the top loader or is there one. and the bell housing differance, will that be a big deal if going with 302 mildly built?? see the add on ebay any thoughts. thanks for help guys
The difference between the BW T-10 and the Ford toploader is about 300 ft pounds of torque. The Toploader uses the same gear train (with synchro mods) as the transaxle used in the GT-40 (original) if my memory serves me. It is a very strong transmission. The input shaft was modified for the FE engines so it could handle the torque of the 427 SOHC. The T-10 is a good tranny but definitely in a different class than the Toploader. For a street engine there is no reason the T-10 should be fine. If you launch your 4000 lb car at 6000 rpm then you are in a place where the Toploader shows its true birthrite.
I had a big spline toploader in my race Mustang and I can't tell you how many trouble free passes I made running consistant 10's. The toploader in my opinion is the strongest production transmission that I know of.
thanks for all the info. i'll just be paitiant and wait for the right toploader to buy. anything else i should be looking for while hunting for the toploader (shifter, linkage, bellhousing)?? thanks again
The big spline NP 833 is about as bulletproof as a toploader, but it was mostly a mopar tranny, I think some chebby 4x4 trucks got it too.
