Project Sleeper - Major progress and a full parts breakdown

This is it, the moment you guys start to see some 110 content and some properly interesting stuff, probably the reason you signed up on here in the first place! From now on the 90's taking a back seat and most of what you see on here will be about building the 110.

Thanks for your patience so far, and for all the support, everything I've made on here has gone straight back into buying parts and making videos. With Rich free next week we're going to start properly filming the 110 build for YouTube now but you'll get to see it all happen each week 

So let's get into it - This post's just an outline of what we've got parts wise and I'll be putting out a new vid tonight. 

Drivetrain 

>Gearbox

From the start we've wanted something a bit tougher than the standard OM606 swap where an adaptor plate's used with the Defender's R380 or LT77 gearbox. This is why we chose the BMW GS6 box albeit a more complex and expensive option. After buying an adaptor plate and flywheel that turned out to be the wrong one, and then being offered the right one at a great discount from Dieselpumpuk, I decided I wanted to bite the bullet and have the gearbox bellhousing modified for a proper 'bolt-on' solution. 

I'm super happy with how the welding came out, it might not be the prettiest to look at but it's a hard job welding the cast aluminium from two different gearboxes. It's also awesome to see how well the jig worked with that tool we made earlier and the engine block to align it in. We still need an adaptor plate and shaft to fit the transfer box but the hard work has been done. Once the 'box/engine are in the chassis we can start looking at making a gear shifter either from scratch or using the LR turret. 

> Flywheel

This is the third and best flywheel so far. Because I didn't do my research properly the earlier Sprinter one we had wouldn't have worked with the welded-bellhousing option. I went for a billet steel flywheel and clutch setup from Tenaci in Sweden (They seem legit - supplying clutch parts to the Formula Drift driver Fredric Aasbø), going for the best because I was so fed up of buying second hand parts which weren't up to the job. Flywheels are boring as far as parts go but this one has two main advantages which make it pretty cool.  It's got a replaceable friction surface and can be configured with Tenaci's own clutch pressure plate at a later date. This means if the clutch is too heavy with the Sachs pressure plate, we can change it out for a Tenaci one which also gives us the option to run two or even three clutch discs for more power handling or better clutch feel. 

>Clutch 

The clutch setup is proven and used on lots of OM606 builds, its a Sachs Race Engineering (SRE) 765 pressure plate which was OEM on the V10 BMW M5's I believe. This is a solid piece of kit and although the clutch pedal feel is said to be unbearable it should have no problem holding all the torque we throw at it. The clutch disc is an unsprung organic-material one with a 26-spline centre to fit the BMW box. I'd have liked to have had a sprung disc because we're using a single-mass flywheel on a box designed for an X5 with a dual mass one so noise and vibrations might be an issue. The organic clutch material has the lowest torque rating (600Nm) but should be much easier to live with compared to a sintered ceramic/puck disc.

The final piece of the clutch puzzle is the concentric clutch slave. After seeing a few adapted versions of the BMW slave setup I decided going all out on a fancy hydraulic setup would be the best option in terms of clutch feel and 'solidness'. The major drawback of having a clutch slave inside the bellhousing is that if it fails you have to take the gearbox off, but as seen in one of the last vids here when the 90 broke down at KFC, standard slave cylinders can fail too. Especially using this very heavy clutch I wanted to have a serious slave cylinder setup designed to work with it. 

That's it for this week's update!