McLeod Aluminum Flywheel; 6 Bolt (96-98 Mustang GT; Late 01-10 Mustang GT)

Video Review & Installation

Justin: The 6 Bolt Aluminum Flywheel from McLeod is gonna be a big-time upgrade for the '96 to '98 GT owners in addition to the late 2001 to 2010 GT owners out there who are still rocking that heavy factory flywheel or maybe even an aftermarket steel option. Now, that's because switching to an aluminum flywheel will shed a big chunk of weight from your rotational mass, which in turn, will help the car feel a little bit more responsive and pull through those revs a little bit quicker. Your only drawback to making the switch to a lighter option is a slight hit to your drivability and maybe a little bit of clutch chatter, depending on the kit you go with. Price point for the highly rated SFI-certified option will be just south of 400 bucks. And the install will, of course, involve dropping that transmission. So, pump this one up to a three out of three wrenches on the difficulty meter with a full detailed walkthrough coming later in the video.Now, the debate between using a heavier option versus a lighter option in regards to your flywheel is not necessarily a new one, but the general rule of thumb is this, a heavier flywheel will be beneficial in two big ways, to get a big, heavy car moving off the line in addition to making the car a little bit more driver-friendly and easier to drive in stop and go traffic. The lighter aluminum option, in my opinion, will shine everywhere else because, let's face it, less rotating mass is usually a benefit when we're talking performance, and that will certainly be the case here when we're talking about the aluminum flywheel from McLeod. But let's dive a little deeper into the McLeod here. From a construction standpoint, again, you are looking at their aluminum option, CNC machined 6061 T6 to be exact.Now, one thing I do dig about McLeod is that they give you guys a lot of options when shopping for your clutch or flywheel products. For instance, in the flywheel category, they're gonna give you a nodular iron version, a lightweight steel version, a aluminum option like we're talking about here, and finally, a chromoly option, all with varying weight from option to option. So, you have a lot of choices with flywheels, but also your clutches as well. Now, McLeod is actually gonna recommend their aluminum flywheel that we have here for supercharged or turbocharged applications or cars, that in their words, will achieve rapid RPM levels, which, let's face it, could be just about anybody. Now, this flywheel, again, has been SFI-certified, which is important as it will make it legal for sanctioned bodies of racing or different racing organizations.Now, a few other important things to point out here with the McLeod, it does feature the 164-Tooth Ring Gear. It has been zero-balanced meaning there's no need for additional counterweights or anything like that and it has been designed to fit your six-bolt car. Just a quick heads up here, guys, if you do have an eight-bolt car instead, McLeod will offer you an identical version of this that you can also find here on the site. But how do you know if you have a six-bolt main or an eight-bolt main? Well, a quick and easy way to find out is to check that VIN. Now, your eighth character or letter in your VIN will actually tell you if you have a six or eight bolt car. Now if you have a W in this eighth position, then you have a Romeo Block and therefore, a six-bolt crank, meaning this is gonna be the flywheel for you. However, if you have an X in that eighth position of your VIN, then you have a Windsor block and corresponding eight-bolt flywheel, meaning this will not work for you.Now, before we touch on the install, it's worth mentioning that McLeod strongly recommends pairing up their aluminum flywheel with one of their many different clutch kits available here on the site in order to guarantee fitment and proper operation. So that is something to keep in mind when shopping for a new clutch as well. As for that install, well, again, the trans does need to get dropped in addition to a few other parts as well to gain access to this area. So, because of that, we'll knock it up to a three out of three wrenches on the difficulty meter. A clutch isn't the hardest job in the world, but if you're not in the garage all the time, it might be a little intimidating for you. Either way, to give you a better idea of what's involved with this job, here is a detailed walkthrough in addition to a tool breakdown.Man: We're gonna start off up top here at the battery. Since we're removing the starter, it's a great idea to disconnect your positive and negative battery cable. Got an 8-millimeter socket on my ratchet here. All right, next we're gonna remove the shifter, that's gonna give us a little more clearance for when we're ready to drop the transmission out. First thing we're gonna do is remove the shift ball followed by the plastic trim. Once we get that up, there's gonna be four bolts to remove the shifter. All right, now if we just pull up on our trim piece here, it should pop out. And we'll have to remove our 12-volt cigarette lighter wire right here. All right, we're gonna remove the heat shield right here. It's four 8-millimeter bolts. All right, now we can pull our heat shield out. And next, we're gonna remove the four bolts that hold the shifter to the transmission. All right, I got a 13-millimeter socket on a quarter-inch drive ratchet. All right, now we're ready to pull our shifter out. All right, we got the car up in the air. We're gonna start off by removing some of the exhaust. We can do the H-pipe first. There's four 15-millimeter nuts up on the exhaust manifolds that we need to remove first followed by the oxygen sensor harness. We have our rear O2 sensors here that need to be removed. And last but not least, the rear H-pipe to muffler bolts.All right, now we can disconnect the O2 sensor harness. It's gonna be a little tough to see once I get my hands up in here. Basically, it sits on top of the transmission, so you can get one hand in there to release the tab. All right, we can now unclip our rear O2 sensors. And the last thing before we drop our H-pipe out is we're gonna, disconnect the rear bolts here. They're a 14-millimeter. We're now ready to pull our stock H-pipe out. All right, next thing we're gonna do is remove our driveshaft. Now, it's good practice to mark your driveshaft with a Sharpie before you pull it just so when you go to put it back together, you can line your marks up and you know everything's gonna be exactly the same as it was. And these bolts, we have four of them. They're a 12-millimeter.All right, next up is the starter. First thing we're gonna do is remove the two wires that are connected to the starter. Make sure you have your battery cables disconnected at this point. This small wire on here is under a 10-millimeter nut. All right, next there's three bolts that hold the starter in place. They are 13-millimeter. All right, with a 10-millimeter socket, we can pull the clutch dust cover inspection box here. All right, I have a pry bar here. What I'm gonna do is place it in between the clutch fork and the transmission and I'm gonna take some of the pressure off the clutch fork so I can release the clutch cable. In order to get our clutch cable out of the transmission, we need to pull this little C-clip right here. Just take a pair of pliers and pull it out. Then we can pull our clutch cable right out of the transmission.The last thing we're gonna do before we pull the transmission is disconnect all the wires that are attached to it. There's a transmission harness that comes down from the top here. There's a couple of plugs that we need to pull. We're gonna start back here. All right, I'm gonna unplug this guy here. And we'll put this harness aside and we can start to unbolt the transmission at this point. We got a pole jack in place here on the tail end of the trans. Next thing we're gonna do is remove the trans crossmember. It's a 13-millimeter socket. There's four bolts, two on each side. It's gonna allow us to drop the trans down a little bit to gain access to the upper bolts on the bell housing.All right, so I realized that we need to remove this cross brace here. With this out, it's gonna let us drop the trans a little bit more so we have more room up top to get to the upper bolts. For the two upper transmission bolts, I have a very long extension with a 13-millimeter universal socket on it. All right, we got the two upper transmission bolts out. I have brought in my transmission jack and I've strapped the transmission to the jack. If you guys don't have one of these, you can use a floor jack or a pole jack. We have three bolts left on this side of the trans and two bolts left on the right side of the trans. After that, we're ready to pull this thing right out of here.All right, we got all our transmission bolts out, now we're ready to remove the transmission. I'm gonna have a buddy help me lift this thing out of here. All right, now that we got the trans out, we can remove the stock clutch. I got a 13-millimeter socket. We're gonna go around and remove the six bolts that hold the clutch into place. All right, we're now ready to remove the stock flywheel. We got six bolts right here and they are a 17-millimeter. We're now ready to install our flywheel. And keep in mind that these only bolt up one way. You have to make sure the bolt holes are lined up perfectly with the crank shaft bolts. I'm gonna use an impact gun to run these bolts the rest of the way in. After that, I'm gonna put a torque wrench on it. And the manufacturer torque spec is 60 foot-pounds. To help me tighten these up with the torque wrench, I put a socket and a ratchet on the crank pulley so that the engine doesn't turn over when I start to crank these down. And you wanna make sure that you're doing this in a star pattern.All right, now that we've got the flywheel in place, we're ready to start installing our new clutch. First thing we're gonna do is put the disc up in place. All right, we're gonna throw our new clutch in place. We have our alignment pin here that Exedy supplies us. Okay, now we're gonna put our pressure plate up in place. Once you've got your dowel pins lined up, you can start throwing some bolts in place. All right, we got all our bolts started. I'm gonna go around and tighten them up now. I have a 13-millimeter on my impact gun. We have our transmission on the transmission jack and we're ready to throw the trans up back into place. All right, we can get our wiring harness back in place now. So, push pins back in the holes in the transmission and we'll plug this sensor back in. And this is gonna go over here. And then we got one more plug to plug back in right here. These are our O2 sensors, we'll hook them up when we get our exhaust back into place.All right, we're ready to bolt the transmission crossmember back up to the floor of the car. I'm gonna raise my pole jack, get a couple of bolts started. We're now gonna put our clutch cable back onto the clutch fork in the transmission. Put our retainer back on. All right, we're gonna need a pry bar to get the shift fork. There we go. And now we can put our dust cover back in place. We're now gonna put our starter back into place. All right, we're gonna hook our starter wires up now. This is a 13-millimeter nut followed by the small wire, which is a 10-millimeter nut. All right, up next is the driveshaft. We'll be putting this back into place. All right, you wanna line your driveshaft up to the mark that we made when we uninstalled it and we'll get some bolts started. We're now ready to reinstall our H-pipe. We're gonna put it up in place, get a couple bolts on it, and we'll tighten it all down. All right, we can throw our K-member support brace back up in place now.All right, we can plug our rear O2 sensors back in now. They're color-coded. All right, we're plugging our front O2 sensors in now. They're really hard to see. Make sure you listen for the click and we're in. We're now ready to reinstall our shifter. Before you put the shifter in, though, make sure you take some Scotch-Brite or some very light sandpaper, clean the old silicone off the bottom of the shifter and off the top of the transmission. Get yourself some black RTV so you get a good seal and we'll reinstall our shifter.Now we can drop our shifter into place and we can put a couple of bolts in now. All right, we can throw our sound deadening plate back in. And snap this guy back into place. And last but not least, we'll put our shift knob back on. And last but not least, we're going to hook up our battery cables.That's gonna wrap up our review and install. Be sure to check out more at americanmuscle.com.