There are holes drilled, not all the way through, in my flywheel. I understand they were to balance. Question is were they to balance the flywheel alone, the flywheel + mag, or the total transmission?
Thanks
I would say just the fly wheel, parts books show the bare fly wheel with balance drillings.
According to 'Ford Shops' , 1915, ... the flywheels were machined on a line 120' long, with 27 separate machine tools, and last Operation #16 was 'Balance on Rockford Tool Co balancing machine'.
Great, that is what I was hoping for!
Rockford Tool Co. was one of many that made Rockford, Ill, the US hub for machine tools, which came about by accident. A trainload of Swedish immigrants was headed from the east to Chicago in about 1850. There was a problem in Chicago, so the train dumped them in Midway City, which is half way from Chicago to Galena on the Mississippi.
The immigrants stayed at the ford of the Rock River, and they became renowned machine tool experts.
Such names as Rockford Screw Products, WF & John Barnes lathes, Barber-Colman weaving machines, Greenlee, Sundstrand and Woodward Governor come from there.
Henry was obviously a good customer.
I have a fly wheel with magnets attached that is balanced in three places. Two really deep holes, and one shallow one. Opposite side of the wheel. All would have had to been done before the magnets were attached. And it doesn't look like it's been rebuild.
This is a 1914 drawing of the factory flywheel balance and drill machine.
My original 25 Coupe has always had a bad vibration. When I rebuilt the engine I had everything balanced. The flywheel must have gone down the assembly line and it was never balanced (no drill holes). The picture shows how much had to be taken off to balance it.If I knew it was that bad, I would have used another one as I have a pile of them.
I wonder if it was a factory reject because it was originally so far off balance, and that's why it had no balancing holes...
I had my flywheel balanced all assembled. It didn't make any sense to me to just balance the flywheel by itself and then bolt on all that other hardware that doubles it's weight, Don.