Tame my 4-speed Stroker....

yellow rose said
In what world is more FW weight better? I damn sure isn't a race car. Maybe a semi truck. Maybe a 5000 pound, low HP car that never sees anything above 3500 RPM. Maybe.

There isn't one, not ONE competent clutch guy, transmission guy, chassis guy, tire guy, shock guy or just general knowledge guy who will tell you adding rotational inertia is a good thing. It breaks parts. It's even harder to manage, regardless of method you chose to do it.

Quite frankly, it's ******* STUPID to tell guys who are chassis and tire limited to add FW weight. You either deal with it by taking clutch out of it, or changing the timer on the CT.

Other than you, I can think of no one I know of who says add FW weight. Not one. To even argue the point is ridiculous. I would mention the Pro Stock and Comp guys, but then I'd hear the "I'm not racing Pro Stock" nonsense I always hear. The clutch I run today WAS Pro Stock in the 1980's. This isn't new. So I'll say I don't know a single, solitary guy running Stock or Super Stock with sticks who use heavy flywheel. Not one. Not a single one. Those guys can run what they want. The exception is those classes (some of which you have outlined above) who by rules have to run a clutch that isn't adjustable. That's it.

I'll tell you Grant, I'd send people your way if you didn't say crazy crap like this. I know there are guys out there, like Jpar who either don't want to deal with an adjustable clutch, or guys who can't afford one, and I'd send them you way. But you have issues like FW weight I just can't get around. And, telling people you have to adjust the clutch for the street and the track. You don't. I didn't have an adjustable pressure plate for years. I never ran over 1000 pounds of base load (most of the time I was at between 600-700), didn't use counter weight and left at 7-7500 with 14x32 tires and on,y drove through the clutch once. And that was my bad in a burn out.

We have to stop, as a group telling people dumb things. I've been a stick guy since I was a kid. There aren't many left, just because of dumb advice and wrong headed thinking. Junk clutches kill parts. Junk clutches with heavy flyweels kills parts faster and have slower time slips.

Hopefully, for the open minded stick guys out there, they can learn something from this thread. Here what they SHOULD learn.

You can be competitive with a stick.
A junk clutch is a junk clutch.
Flywheel weight is bad.
You need to control your clutch lock up.
If you aren't willing to learn how to tune a clutch, or can't afford a good one, then the Clutch Tamer is about the only option you have, other than going slow, beating the car to death and killing parts.
There is zero logic in using a sintered iron disc and a Clutch Tamer. If you are going to use a sintered iron disc, just pay the extra money for the adjustable pressure plate.
You should be using an aluminum flywheel either way.

Here's the part that seems to fly over your head- Never did I say heavier flywheel is quicker, the point i'm making is that flywheel weight isn't a handicap when it makes the process more efficient. You say get the lightest flywheel you can find, I say you can get a flywheel that's too lite.

One thing a flywheel does is act as a heat sink for the clutch disc, as does the pressure plate ring. It's a given that something needs to slip for a bit or you will either bog the engine, blow the tires off, or break parts. If part of your launch plan includes controlled wheelspeed, some of that slipping duty is shared by both the clutch and the tires. Because in this case the clutch doesn't have to do all the slipping that's needed, you can get away with a smaller/lighter flywheel and clutch. And given that most all clutch development in the past for cars like ours have included wheel speed as part of their launch plan, we now have flywheels and clutches that are too lite to handle the thermal load of doing all the slipping necessary by themselves.

Ever see one of Rob Youngblood's flywheels? Pretty much the minimum amount of mass there to get the job done that it was designed for, and one thing that they are not designed for is to do ALL the slipping that's required for a dead hook radial friendly launch. Same goes for the typical aluminum flywheel with a bolt-in "heat shield". In that case you have two different materials that expand at different rates. They may be flat at room temp, but the shield gains temp quicker than it can pass it onto the aluminum. At some point as temps rise the shield begins to warp, which causes it to lose intimate contact with the aluminum, which in-turn further reduces the aluminum's ability to act as a heat sink. It's a downward spiral that damages the clutch. Thicker heat shields help reduce the warping, so do segmented inserts. Something that eliminates the warping altogether is one piece flywheels with enough mass to control the temperature rise. Since an aluminum flywheel without an insert isn't really practical, steel becomes a simple effective solution.

You can run a sintered iron disc with a 'tamer, I have for years. When you run radials, it makes logical sense. I currently have a Ram dual friction disc in the car just to gather some data, seems to be working with the radials. It's seen 8600 quite a bit, organic side hasn't objected yet. Steel flywheel, nod iron pressure ring.

Grant