what he basically said is that these masurements are rarely posted anywhere. when he gets a used flywheel that he has to resurface, he doesn't really need the original dimensions to know how much the distance is. how come??? well here is why:
turns out that the clutch disk area is smaller than the main contact area ofthe flyhweel. therefore, when a flywheel has been on a car, say for 60-100k miles, the disk itself had removed a slight layer of the flywheel's mating surface. thus, the "step" is getting bigger/thicker. because the area of the clutch is smaller, it does not take away a layer of the entire mating area. instead, it leaves a very tiny and narrow "lip" on the outer edge of the mating area (right next to the mounting surface are/edge), and also leaves a bigger/wider area near the bolts of the flywheel. in turn, these two areas are never affected by the friction of the disk over the years/milage. so what he does, is he measures to the thausands, the thicknes of the "step", using this tiny edge, which was never touched by the disk. knowing that this lip is the original unafectted area and thicknes of the flyhweel, after measuring he knows what the original thicknes of the "step" was. then, he resurfaces both planes (the mounting and mating surfaces) and keeps the thicknes of the "step" the same as it was before (when he measured it) he did the turning. makes sense? right.
now, my flywheel has been resurfased before, but only the mating area was. however the stupid idiot that did it, did not even resurface the entire mating area, instead, he resurfaced the area only where the clutch made contact. so this original edge/lip was still there, so he was able to measure it. he also had some specs from the regular contour flywheel and the numbers were almost identical. so he is pretty sure in what he is saying.
on top of that, we could notice that the spec clutch disk did not even touch the flywheel at its entire surface. in otherwords, mine was machined under angle (was not mounted properly on the flywheel grider when it was first machined) which contributed to an uneven resurfacing. the result was that the clutch never made a flat contact with the flywheel, and probably that was the cause that it broke on me after 5000 miles. this so far is only an assumtion, but he will resurface the flywheel tomorrow and he will be able to tell me if this is true or not...if it is, i would really want to kick that idiot's azz, because this stupid mistake of his costed me a lot. a week without a car. 12 hours of work, plus around $400 for new clutch kit and resurfacing...i will be reaaaaally maad...
