I Have been trying to get rid of a vibration on my 454 for years, I even tried a Fluidamper balancer which helped. I just pulled the trans out and here is what I found the weights are slung to one end of the clutch. I know most members here have had good luck with the Centerforce and some have complained about a vibration., but this BS design has cost me money and a lot of frustration. If anyone with a Centerforce has any vibration this is the first place I would look.

 

If your motor is out of balancein the first place or if the PP and FW is clocked wrong it can cause vibration
Not sure why some of theweights look cockeyed. Try calling CF? They are usually pretty helpful

 

I never had a vibration but I took those weights off and never had to worry about them again. I have heard they only give maybe 5% more holding. I ran a 500+ motor this way and it never slipped with some pretty sticky tires. Ditch those weights.

 

That certainly seems odd... I wonder if they sort out when the engine is spinning as this is how centrifugal weights work. If not that would cause an awful vibration.

I agree contact centerforce on this. I did a little searching and found allot of people complaining about this and that it was causing the clutch disk to wear funny. Some guys are saying cut the wire bail and remove the weights. I would simply pull it all and replace with a good dual friction setup with a light pedal pressure pressureplate.

http://www.pro-touring.com/archive/i...p/t-70177.html

http://www.trifive.com/forums/archiv...p/t-10304.html

I am pretty sure you found your issue here. Are you sure you have the proper flywheel on your engine? 454's are externally balanced and the dampner and flywheel have to be correct.

I am sure youve been all over the engine for this but on vibration issues the first thing I do disconnect all the engine accessories alternator, power steering, water pump etc just pull all the belts and try that.

 

I do have the correct flywheel and dampner, I just started the engine without the clutch and took it up to 4000 rpm its nice and smooth now. I'm going with a different brand clutch never again will I buy a Centerforce clutch.

 

Was the clutch properly clocked to the flywheel? Should have been marked with a yellow grease pen or something similar.

 

Yes, I should have taken the picture a little higher, there is a yellow mark on the flywheel and clutch and they both line up.

 

Centerforce claims these weights are self centering. If that is so there wouldn't be any mass imbalance contribution. The physics of this eludes me a bit. When a weight by itself moves outboard it would have more centrifugal force on it than the one across the diameter. So the outboard weight would stay out there. However I noticed that when the ring moves off center the outboard weights expand and the inboard weights contract. So there is less mass density outboard and more mass density inboard and that might be how they end up being self center. If so that is pretty clever.

I tried looking up their patent and found a patent under their holding company. Couldn't find any images (something with my browser I think) and I only found the one patent which didn't appear to address this.

They have a different design on their LMC LS series 11" clutch.



It has a circumferential thick wire ring and additionally some stops on the fingers. Also the diameter of the weights is greater so there is less mass imbalance. And some of the weights engage the thick ring.

There is a lot of hyperbole about the weights both ways. For the more theoretically minded of us it would be enlightening for a CF engineer to provide a little deeper understanding than "aren't these cool?". Clearly a lot of thought has gone into this. Maybe the "thought" is like "keep adding fixes", that's also possible.

I am going to call them next week on a different subject and see if I can get them to provide more insight to forum members.

The different subject is throwout bearings. Their stock TOB is great, never had a problem. But for a longer TOB situation (i.e. LS conversion) the TOB they provide is the proverbial POS made in Mexico. Not my intent to dis "Made in Mexico" as some stuff is pretty good. But their recommended TOB isn't and the one I had in my car was on the road to failure after a few hundred miles. It is by the way the same one that McLeod supplies.

Happily I found this (read the box)



and will try to suggest to CF that they source this instead. It also has the stop rotation feature which you can see in the picture.

The jeep guys have an adjustable choice

https://www.novak-adapt.com/catalog/...t_bearings.htm

I was going to start my own thread on the subject but this one is so new I decided it was on its way to being read by many people.

 

I had the same problem with a motor I had built 10 years ago. Installed the motor with a CF Dual Friction clutch. Chased a vibration for a year until I pulled the transmission and saw that the weights were slung over to the side. I removed the clutch/pressure plate assy and fired it up. Vibration was gone. You could tell the weights had been riding off to the side by the wear marks. But I could move the weights around freely so they were not hung up. My engine builder told me that he could never get one to balance out correctly and does not recommend them. I had my rotating assembly balanced when he built the motor and looking back on it, it doesn't make sense to hang a clutch on the crank with movable weights IMHO. I installed an McLeod and have been happy with it. Others have had luck with them, I didn't.

 

me to. X2

 

I've never a centerforce clutch that didn't have a vibration. And it would change every time you pushed in and let out the clutch. Removing the weights and having the pressure plate and flywheel balance together solved the problem.
Mike

 

Well isn't this interesting. Here is PP I pulled out of my car because of a significant vibration. First picture, the weights were all the way over to one side and must have stayed there because there is a scraped area corresponding to the outer ring of the weights. If they really were self-centering, this wouldn't be there.



Second picture, with the weights all the way over, here is what the side nearer to the centerline looks like.

 

What is the significance of the marks on the flywheel? I just installed my clutch and the flywheel was an old one I had lying around that I had balanced and resurfaced. I didn't see a paint mark on it, but then I didn't really look all that hard. I just assumed the pressure plate would be neutral balanced and there would be no need to worry about how it was indexed to the flywheel.

 

For what its worth - The new Centerforce LMC LS PP I posted a picture of above went in with the weights attached. While I can't say it is butter smooth like my wife's BMW or my Z06, it is acceptable and a far cry from the stuck weights in my second set of pictures. I've done so many things to the suspension that make the ride harsher that I can't separate out the clutch. Is there a lesson here? Well no. It would be nice of CF to put some numbers to the efficacy of these weights in terms of clamping force. I did a very crude calculation that suggests to me that it is worth maybe a hundred pounds of clamping force.

Hopefully this is the last clutch job for a while, although I am getting good at it!