Hi Paul, sorry for the delay in replying - I'm not on here every day - maybe we need some sort of "heads up" for questions resulting from a post? Although a private message will do that.
anyway to your questions.
1/ I thought about some sort of centreing fixture but in the end I have never had a problem after just letting the top halves of the clamps settle in to place and tightening from below. There is also a small amount of fiddling available to help with getting the belt to run to the middle of the rear sprocket. a good rule of thumb to check after fitting is to see if the new clamp is central between the remnants of the old mounting bracket where it was ground off. which raises the question - are there machines which had no welded on bracket in the first place? The NVH kit being fitted at time of build.
2/. I have never seen a handbrake cable support there so I guess its not so important. The important thing is to keep the petrol pipes and brake hose, along with the handbrake cable up tight to the gearbox rear mount. Why don't they run them over the top? That would be much safer.
The vertically split clamp is a good idea but I would not like to have any stresses set up in the chassis tubes - that is one reason why my clamps have the polyurethane liner. It would also be difficult to get the outer part of the clamp over the chassis. Maybe there is another solution using a vertical split and clamp screws. I'll spend some more time on the drawing board!
Thanks for letting me know how its all progressing.
Phil
