The clutch/swing arm assembly was not difficult. Fabricating the parts took the greatest amount of time. Drilling the swing arm bracket on the frame was tricky as you will see below. As usual, I got so involved in the construction process that I forgot to take as many pictures as I would like.

This is the clutch pulley and swing arm. I've already mounted the pulley and prepared to drill the mounting bolt hole.

This is the clutch spring tube. The springs slip into the cylinder beneath the actuator piston. Two rivets will be located at the top of the cylinder to serve as keepers for the piston. The bottom of the cylinder and the attachment arm had to be tapped to accept the swivel rod end attachments ( not in the picture ).

There was splatter from welding the attachment arm to the spring tube cylinder that had to be removed. Another job for the mighty Dremmel.

On to the swing arm mounting. It is impossible to drill the swing arm mounting bracket without removing the main drive sprocket. At least that's what the RotorWay construction manual leads you to believe. I did not want to remove the main drive sprocket because that means dismounting the secondary unit so the drive belt can be removed. That's undoing a lot of work that I just got finished. So I figured out an ingenious way to drill the hole. By the time I got done with the ingenuity, I could have just a quickly removed the main drive sprocket.

You can't tell form the picture but you can't get a drill with a drill bit located to drill the holes in the actuator arm mounting bracket without some mechanical gymnastics or unbolting the main drive sprocket.

As you can see from the picture above I decided to attack from the bottom of the bracket. There wasn't enough room to get the drill and a regular bit into position. I used two drill bits. Both bits had to be cut short to fit into the tight space required to drill the holes. The shortest bit was used to drill the bottom hole. Then the longer bit was pushed up into the hole. Then the drill chuck was attached to the drill and the upper hole was drilled. If you look closely at the longer drill bit you can see a chamfer on the chuck end of the bit. The space that I had to fit the drill to the bit was so tight that the chamfer was necessary to get the bit into the chuck.

Hind Sight: Go with the book and move the main sprocket.

You can see I drilled out shim material to fit around the swing arm mount weldment. I clamped the shim material to the frame so that proper alignment was maintained while drilling the top mounting hole.

Man, I sure went to a lot of trouble to avoid a little trouble!