[SwitchbladeII]

I am posting this in hopes it may help someone not to go through the aggravation I had. First let me say that I have had multiple cars with manual transmissions and have installed more clutches than I can remember. My last car project before getting into trucks was a 1969 big block SS Chevelle w/ a Muncie M22 4 speed. I had a fair amount of things on my to-do list to fix change etc. The first one, was the clutch it had to go to the floor to shift gears and to allow the minimum free play. No big deal I figured the pressure plate was shot so it needed to be replaced. I put in new pressure plate, clutch disc; TO and pilot bearing and refaced the flywheel, adjusted free play and it was the same as before. The only way I could get correct free play and be able to shift without issue was to remove the trim piece under the steering column to give the pedal a little more travel. It was a Zoom clutch not top of line but I had sold a lot of these years ago when I worked in a speed shop never had any issues with them. Ok maybe it was defective so I replaced everything with a Centerforce set up. Yep you guessed it no change. Well it must be the slop in the linkage, so I replaced everything starting with the pedal to the fork and ball in bellhousing and everything in between. Still no change now this is driving me to drink (more)! In case you are wondering all parts were correct. I ran this by a lot of people and no one had a solution I hadn't tried. Could I have gotten two defective pressure plates and the original was just warn out. I called Centerforce the tech was great I went over all I had done. He said they had found some GM bellhousings had the hole for the ball drilled and taped too deep and this could be the issue. I didn’t think it was the problem but at this point I was willing to try anything. I was able to back the ball out using a cut down allen wrench without pulling the transmission. The little bit I backed it out made all the difference, able to set free play and shift with pedal half way to the floor. This little bit of change had a big effect on the geometry of the fork travel. I had to replace the TO bearing a while later due to not enough free play prior to the fix. Found the measurements to check distance from face of bellhousing to ball and it was perfect. Sorry for the long winded post but needed to list all I did and spent because something was overlooked that I hadn’t come across before!