Over the weekend I heard a strange vibration/rattle noise when on a hunting trip. I noticed it right when I pulled off the dirt road and came to a stop. Got out and noticed my harmonic balancer/crank pulley wobbling. This engine was recently dropped in about 2 years ago. It was a remanufactured long block and its got maybe 1500 miles on it. The harmonic balancer is still the factory part from 1988 so Im not suprised the rubber finally failed. My concern though, is that I see what looks like some melted plastic sitting inside the lower timing cover where the pulley slips onto the crank shaft. Haven’t gotten a chance to pull the pulley off due to work this week so I haven’t inspected it too heavily yet, but has anyone had this incident where the pulley would wobble enough to touch the timing belt cover and possibly melt some of it off? I recently did some work on the cooling system a couple weeks ago and while the engine was idling i did not notice anything odd as far as belts/pulleys acting out of the ordinary so I hope it just got serious on this trip and I caught this soon enough. Hopefully my crankshaft is not warped.

 

was the bolt loose?

 

Between work and rain I haven’t been able to take my fan out to fit a socket on the bolt, but it’s not loose enough to spin by hand.

 

So I opened everything up today. When I pulley the belts off, the crank pulley/balance was able to be wiggled by hand. Was able to loosen the bolt by hand. Pulled it off and the slot for the key was filled with metal powder. Woodruff key looks to have sheard off behind the harmonic balancer and i see no sign of wher the slot for the woodruff key would be. I dont even know where to go from here…

 

Nevermind, Im just dumb and panic too easily. The crank gear for the timing belt walked out a quarter inch or so since the bolt was so loose. Key is still in tact. I think the powder I saw was ground up plastic from the back of the timing cover.

 

When you get it back together, you're going to have to hit 181 ft-lbs or you'll be back where you started. This post might help: https://www.yotatech.com/forums/f116...h-3vze-137934/

 

Yeah i used a piece of channelizer against the frame and bolted it to the pulley to get it torqued. I bought a new bolt but didn’t use loctite on it. I couldn’t figure out if loctite is recommended or not for that bolt.

 

Good choice. If you used Loctite, future-you might have to put over 300 ft-lbs on the bolt to remove it!