5 Plate Clutch Cork grip

[Wee Mark]

Any advantage in filing out the extra material on low points on cork clutch plates just to leave square pads of cork,
looking to maximise grip, using a five plate and their seems to be less depth on these compared to 4 plate equivalent
Sorry if this has been answered on here before, I did try a search to no avail
Cheers
Mark

[rossclark]

I cut down the sides of the blocks with a Stanley knife then use a small flat blade screwdriver to scrape off the material between the blocks. It's supposed to improve the circulation of the oil.

PITA of a job...

Sorry these are v*spa plates, but you get the picture.

[Wee Mark]

thanks Ross yeah that exactly what I meant, I can only think it should improve grip too....can see it will take a while!!!.... cheers

[Warkton Tornado No.1]

I used to do what rossclark says & may do again! But......When I was using the CamLam race clutches, the corks were so thin that I feared that removing anything between the pads might affect the adhesion/bonding of the cork to their plates. So I stopped doing so.(In any case, they’d fragment so easily, I gave them up for a modified motorcycle clutch, but that’s another story)

You’d think that clearing the slots as much as possible would help the clutch grip, wouldn’t you? It’s logical, isn’t it?

Just to add to the (my) confusion, Bantam racers now seem to use ‘steel on steel’ apparently with great success:

“Most race Bantams now run on an all steel clutch made and hardened from standard stripped friction plates and the steel plates left soft and bored out a little”

In other words, no slots @ all!

That’s with only three gears (in the majority of cases) requiring an enormously high first to be slipped like a b@st@rd to pull away to obtain anything like a close ratio gearbox!

I’m not contradicting any advice on this issue, but it really does make you wonder how instrumental the slots are, doesn’t it?