To stiffen the chassis I’m going to use four indexable links to make the bellhousing a stressed member that triangulates the fore billet chassis uprights. This is the same approach that I took with the aft billet chassis uprights as shown below.
To accomplish this, four of the bellhousing-to-engine bolts will replaced with longer bolts to accommodate rod ends and misalignment washers. The first step was to design a plate (orangish) from 1/8” 4130 to place the rod ends in double shear.
I added three M10 1.5mm bolts and aluminum spacers (green) to each side to stiffen the double shear plate. This required me to remove the bellhousing and drill and tap it. It’s a beautiful piece of billet so I was careful not to f’ it up. I tried to fixture it via the flanges, but that obstructed the areas that I needed to drill. I found the best way to accomplish it was using long bolts through the center as shown below.
Having access to a large mill with a DRO made this a straight-forward process.
Everything worked as planned. The next step is to fabricate the spacers, double shear plates, indexable links and the brackets that mount to the billet chassis uprights.