Thanks Vic for the update

 

Could this pulley "issue" have anything to do with a "2 piece" design?

I only ask because I have never heard of it with a 1 piece design (ie ASP).

 

just to be clear, i'm not bashing or complaining. i just want to share info. thanks

 

I thought ASP welded a piece on, making it a 2 piece?

 

I dont think so.. ASP has bad wobble issues on some of their pullies because the outer ring is welded onto the main pulley body.. If its not perfect before they weld it, it will wobble and throw belts..

I had this problem, JakPro did and a few others.

Sometimes a wobble can be an illusion depending on dirt on the tracks, belts, etc.. Sometimes a wobble really is a wobble..

Once I get it in my hands I'll know more what to say.

 

its the intallation..

regardless if the torque on the bolt was set properly.. if the bolt is not all the way in, it will wobble.

I also I agree on ASP appears to wobble just a bit.. but its actually a optical illusion. The welds on the outside of the ring make the pulley spinning a bit uneven.

But in my case, the belt has never skipped or shredded.. and I do not have that much slippage.

A true wobbling pulley would be felt and seen clearly.

I had the same issue with my installer first installed my ASP pulley.. he used lock tight and the bolt would not go in all the way.

When the shop owner saw the wobbling he corrected the issue making sure the thread on the bolt was nice and clean.

I don't rule out a manufacturing error, but highly unlikely.

 

I have the Kleeman pulley and also have a wobble also but so far nothing for the past 50,000 miles or so. Had the car dynoed not too long ago and everything was running the way it should be with no noise from the bottom end. Pulled the pulley off to inspect the key everything good with no mis-alignment or physical damages to the key slot on the pulley. Had everything put back on and still it wobbles. Maybe it's just me but maybe some of these cars come with a wobble from the factory...i could be wrong though but no problems here

 

This is what Vadim and I both said initially and why we asked for the crankshaft bolt to be sent to us. You can measure the length of the bolt to see if it was stretched and that will tell you if the pulley was properly seated against the crank before it was tightened.

I know that if the key and keyway are not 100% lined up, the key will not go all the way down.. it looks like it is seated, but in reality its not. Its only when you try to tighten down the crank bolt that you realize its not going on properly. At that point its too late; you will end up with score marks on the key and you will have to replace it.

If you dont notice this and you end up starting the car, well... then you end up with keyway, key and possible crank damage.

We asked for the bolt, but the installer threw away both bolts from both installs so we have no way to verify that part of it.

Now, i am waiting for USPS to deliver Wayne's pulley to me so I can physically inspect it.

I will post everything once I have the pulley.

 

I'm getting the optical part. Mine looks like it has the slightest of wobbles, but the belt runs true as do the grooves. Also, I've put almost 10K in hard miles on mine and have never damaged or even started to tear a belt. I agree with most that it is more of an install issue than hardware. If hardware, usually an entire batch may be off, due to something being out of calibration during the process. It is pretty rare to find a single oddball.

 

I don't like your approach.
You should have an anonymous employee come here and hype your product while badmouthing the competition. Then you vehemently agree with him, while he posts fake exotic car pics to boost his cred.

....wait, that didn't work so well last time.

for you doing the right thing.

 

.. indeed I visually found oem pulley not 100% wobble-free at idle. that could be caused by other forces operating ..like belt

I investigate dthi sissue because I was concerned about installling an aftermarket pulley ( a clutch-style pulley) that I checked for balancing and found Not properly balanced.

so, I took another oem pulley and checked it for balancing at the same machine and ... found it was NOT perfectly balanced, too.

This gave me a certain peace of mind.

for sure, if the pulley is not only slightly un-balanced but also off-centered (uncorrectly manufactured) ... that is not good.

hope it helps.

 

My OEM pulley was wobble free, as is my ASP.

dyno: can you please share more about your balancing tests ? Thanks.

 

unfortunately I cannot say much more ... here's what i already posted
https://mbworld.org/forums/showpost....4&postcount=11



here, from Fluidampr -Usa web site
you may find some more insight on how the system works and their choice

----------------

point is that I don't know if stock pulley was designed to have a balancing effect for the crank or to be neutral. So decided better.."keep it simple stupid".. even not make it lighter
and I ended up with a new pulley that shared Oem's hub.

 

EVOTECH pulley here and I must admit the quality is exceptional (regardless of what happened with Adam etc). However, she does wobble a tiny bit as well. Watched Ken install right in front of me.

 

i've seen stock pulley's with small amounts of wobble so i think there's a lot of worry about nothing so far.

 

dyno bro, keep our insights a secret!!! Haha!! Don't you dare tell anything else.

 

Tell that to my shredded belts/crank.

 

Just checked. No discernible wobble on mine.

 

well, i did say "small" amounts.

 

I finally got Wayne's pulley out of Canada Postal Service and into my hands. I spent a good amount of time this morning looking it over to see what went wrong and where the issue lies.

I've posted many times that I have nothing to hide and will share information whether good or bad with regards to the things we build and work on. No one is perfect, and sometimes mistakes or mishaps happen.

My concern is when an issue is raised about a problem with one of our products that we determine right away if we do have a manufacturing, product or installation issue.

This situation was a bit complicated because I sold these VRP 2piece pullies to LET, who in turn sold them to CPT who in turn sold them to 2 of their customers (Marcus and Wayne). CPT performed the install on both cars.. I am not sure how close together these 2 installs were from one another but nevertheless, I was told that these 2 pullies were bad and had a severe wobble when the cars were first started up. Right now, I only have Wayne's pulley to work from..

In this particular case, I gave everyone the benefit of the doubt and sent the money back to LET to have Wayne refunded before I received the pulley to inspect it. In my heart I still did not believe we had 2 bad apples out of 20 and that they both ended up in Chicago in LET's customers hands, but, I didn't want to rule it out completely until I saw the pulley for myself.

I want to be clear; I am not bashing anyone or pointing fingers.. I am just going to put out what I see with my eyes and I ask anyone that has any input to please put forth your thoughts.

First, I will start by showing a picture of what a perfectly healthy and functional VRP 2piece pulley looks like (the one on the left). On the right, is a picture of Wayne's pulley just as it was when I pulled it out of the box.




Below is a closeup shot of Wayne's pulley showing the keyway area.

A couple of things:

1) Notice the green line I drew. It points to a very lightly etched ring that goes around the perimeter of the opening but it stops short on one side. It is supposed to end right at the edge of the keyway but it doesn't..

2) In red, I circled an area which shows some damage at the top of the keyway. You can see how its bent outward on the left side.. There is clearly visible damage to the keyway.

3) I noticed that inside the keyway on the bottom 3/4 (everything outside of the area marked in red) that the wear marks are vertical which is normal because the key is moving up and down.. On the top part of the keyway and just to the left there are some darker patches which to me looked like some black paint or something was painted on those parts because they dont match the wear marks with their surrounding areas.




I took out a cotton swab, put some nail polish remover on it, and rubbed up and down the keyway and to the left where I saw the darker patch.




Below is a shot of the keyway after I rubbed it for a few seconds with the cotton swab. You can see where I marked with a red line that there appears to be some leftover residue of black paint or something which I didn't completely rub off with the nailpolish remover, but you can clearly see an indent inside the keyway and just to the left of it. I also noticed that now the area that I cleaned matches the look of the surrounding areas.

There are clearly visible notches and damage on the keyway. The top is bent inward, the side is bent outward and the damage goes down as far as the where the ring runs around the perimeter of the opening.





Here is another shot with the area under some better lighting. The residue is more aparent here, and you can see that everywhere else that I removed the residue, the metal matches the look of all the surrounding areas now.




Here is another angle shot from the top so you can see the strike mark inside the keyway area.





This last shot is with a little more cleaning on the top of the keyway. You can now start to see the shiney metal showing through where the damage is on the left of the keyway at the very top and you can very clearly see the damage on the inside of the keyway to just below the ring..





In my opinion Wayne's issues were caused by an improper installation. Something went wrong and the key was not properly seated in the keyway. When the crankshaft bolt was installed and torqued down I am assuming it caused some damage and the rest was caused as soon as the car was started.

Anyone who knows more about this stuff than I do, I would appreciate your thoughts and input on this.

 

That is what I consider a vendor who backs his product and cares what happens to his clients!!!

 

if you motor and crank is straight and vic took care of you, this is far and away the best place you could be in and vic is the reason why.

any installer no matter how great CAN have an employee have a bad day and just not give a car 100% attention unfortunately.

 

The reason the pulley is damaged is because it did not hold up to the torque required to tighten the crank bolt to spec, which is 200 nm plus 90 degrees.

 

If that were indeed the case, wouldn’t logic dictate that the entire length of the keyway be damaged?

 

I really did not want to get involved in this discussion, however as you can see my name was mentioned before. I have forwarded this link to CPT and I expect to see a response from them soon.

First some full disclosure. I've known Victor for a long time and I consider him a friend. I was dealing with VRP but in the chain of communication kind of got caught up in this even without wanting to. I am also friends with Al @ CPT and have spent a lot of money with them but at the same time consider them to be a friend of his as well as a customer.

This is an uncomfortable position for me, but I feel the duty to be objective in my analysis of the situation, so my personal predisposition has to take a back seat and I want everyone to know that I'm not playing favorites here. This is what I believe to be true in my experience.

I disagree with Victor's assumption that the damage to the keyway is done by an incorrect installation. CPT is an authorized Kleemann dealer and this is like the 20th or 30th crank pulley they've installed for these Kompressor cars (including both V8K and V6K cars). I know the whole crew there and they haven't changed mechanics or techs since they started doing MBs, so this isn't a possibility of some new guy working on these cars. There are three things here.

First, if the suggestion was that the pulley was not fully installed over the keyway, and then as the crankbolt was tightened to spec to press the pulley forward to it's required position over the crankshaft and keyway, and in doing so it distored the keyway, would have left a different impression on the pulley. The keyway is obviously rounded at the tip and if you were to see the actual key, you can clearly see that the key was pushing into the pulley and a left to right angle, and NOT a forward to backward angle. If the pulley damaged the keyway during installation, you simply would not see the type and DIRECTION of damage shown in these pictures. The pictures represent after the car was started, the pulley began to wobble and as it wobbled, it began to press against the one side of the keyway and as time passed (in Wayne's case, dyno time) the key kept pressing against the keyway and resulted in the damage of the keyway and the metal built up on the one side of the keyway. You can see there is a somewhat of a slight angle from front to back of the keyway which also coincides with a pulley wobbling front to back. If the keyway had been damaged during installation, you would see more metal towards the tip of the key in the keyway and there would not be a curved impression at the end of the key indicating the key was pressed and shaped against the keyway.

Secondly, I think the real issue here is with distortion of the inner ring material under the factory torque specs. I do not know if VRP conducted something like a Rockwell test to measure the hardness of the metal, but the truth is that the factory torque spec for this crankbolt (and most crankbolts) is extremely high, and if the wrong material is used, will cause the shaftway (and, as a result, the keyway) to in essense distort under the pressure from the crankbolt when the pulley is tigtened down. In this case, you would see the base of the shaftway and keyway slightly bell outwards as the bolt presses the base part of the pulley against the back surface. That will cause the keyway to become slightly englarged and will also actually throw the pulley off balance, exasterbating the wobble that is already inherent with a slightly enlarged keyway.

Finally, there's is evidence in this thread there are other VRP pullies (jangy) as well as other manufacturers who also have pullies that wobble. I was actually told by an MB tech that even some stock pullies wobble, but not to an extreme degree. Personally, I've never heard of a car coming with wobbling pullies from the factory, at least not in the past 20 years. There's a deeper issue here that's somewhat alarming if this is something that is compounded by something from the factory.

I want to again stress that I have not dealt with a technical issue like this in the past. I've seen dampners fail but that is pretty straight forward. This is not an easy issue to diagnose, and I might be mistaken in some of my analysis. I'd like to turn this unfortunate situation into something by which the community benefits from, and not let it turn into a pissing match (which, unfortunately, appears to be the direction it's going).

I'm not upset by this ordeal, either towards VRP or CPT. I've been in this game too long to expect everything to be perfect. VRP and CPT have both gone way beyond their duties with me in the past for me to let an issue like this overshadow their previous efforts, however again I think there's a responsibility we collectively have to solve this issue and make everyone happy.

Regards,

Marcus