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To quickly make a new shim, we ordered a sheet of laminated shim stock from McMaster Carr. This stuff is a stack of 0.002″ shims glued together so you can peel them to the thickness you need. With the naked eye, its literally impossible to tell this isn't a solid piece of sheet aluminum. I had to take this close-up picture and zoom in on it to actually see the layers. But with microscopically thin layers, how the hell do you peel it down to the thickness you want?
I don't know what you're supposed to do, but i filed the edge of the sheet at an angle so I could see the layers, then picked at them with a razor blade to get them to start peeling.
The actual peeling is a tremendous pain in the ass that's made slightly less tremendous by the careful application of heat. I say careful not only because you'll burn yourself grabbing the hot shim to pull it off, but also because too much heat will warp the stack.
With the shim thickness corrected, I re-sealed the crank nose with anaerobic Mopar transmission sealer goo. Since this stuff doesn't dry in air, you have all the time in the world to get your bits and pieces lined up.
While we had it apart, I decided to upgrade the flywheel bolts. Since it was machined in a hurry during a gap in the schedule, the flywheel adaptor part used easier-to-find M12x1.25 fine threads rather than the bizarre M12x1.0 ultra-super-duper-fine threads Mazda uses. During assembly, we had used socket head cap screws, which are strong enough, but required us to shave down the heads slightly to clear the clutch.
None of that is really a big deal, but these witness marks on the flywheels might be. The way the bolts were digging into the flywheel was giving me the heebiejeebies, so I went to the ARP catalog looking for something better.
Although the exact bolt I needed wasn't in the catalog, a quick call to ARP solved the problem. It turns out the catalog only covers a small portion of ARP's inventory. If you need something else, figure out EXACTLY what you need (size, thread pitch, length) and give them a call.
