I have a new clutch and will be installing it soon, its not often that I get to put a clutch in and never in a slant six. Its nice to hear others procedures.

Strange that my engine ( 1986 ) and original N.P 435 trans bell housing have to be removed as an assy in order to service the clutch and in order to get at the flywheel or remove the bell housing assy the clutch has to be removed.

There are two bolts that are behind the flywheel in other words that go thru the bellhousing and then pass into engine block.

At first I thought someone had rigged something but after getting it all apart I can see this was inherent within the design.

Anyone else run across this?

Both the 60's and 70's-80's bellhousings require that you remove the tranny, remove the clutch cover loosen each bolt a bit and rotate the crank until you can remove all the cover bolts, then you can use a socket and extension to remove the flywheel/crank bolts, then you can access the 2-3 "hidden bolts"...

This is a necessary design when using the 11" clutch and flywheel which are similar to the big block clutch and flywheel which has a greater diameter than the standard flywheel that accepts the 9.25" and 10" clutch thus the bellhousing has to flare out a bit to catch the smaller slant six bolt pattern on the block and still house the monster flywheel.

I will also note that there are two different flywheels over the years for this application (the early version uses the direct drive starter only and the late version uses the standard starter).

-D.Idiot

Crazy design but glad to hear that I was not missing something. Thanks