Thread: General Hemi Info part 3

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At one time I was going to put a 331 Non Extended HEMI and A833 4 speed in a 54 Studebaker PU. My friend who ran a machine shop and I figured out how to do the conversion and actually started building it but I ended up selling the truck before we finished it.

For this swap we were going to use a stock Dodge Truck bell housing (the HEMI/POLY bell housings are the same), starter flywheel, pressure plate and 11” passenger car clutch disc(the 11” truck disc was the wrong spline count for the 833).

The reason I was going this route was that I wanted to retain the thru-the-floor clutch and brake peddles. On the Studebaker (and other 50’s era trucks like Dodge and Ford) the clutch linkage is built to pull rather than push. That’s what this bellhousing was designed for and this Dodge setup even uses the same throw out bearing as the 51-52 Ford.

I had collected the parts and got as far as building a sleeve to go over the pilot bearing retainer to make it the required size for the throw out bearing (it’s shown in the picture beside the bearing retainer, all that was left was tack welding the sleeve to the stock bearing retainer ).

That left building a plate that would bolt to the back of the bellhousing (with countersunk bolts). The plate would be big enough to accept the A833 transmission bolt pattern and the correct width to position the transmission depth wise (as I recall the thickness we needed was about 1”). The center hole would be bored to the correct size for the bearing retainer that was to be used. The centering process is pretty much the procedure you go through when determining if a bellhousing is properly centered (or the cheaters method I used when setting up my 4 speed for the 57 Plymouth, which was a dummy case with input shaft and bearing retainer).

If you have the parts lying around this could also be a good cheap way to get a 4 speed in your car or truck. If you need the linkage to push rather than pull, just turn the lever over from the top to the bottom. The only real draw back I saw with it was that it required the use of an original HEMI starter which can be a little hard to come by.