Glad you made it home Mark! The pulley attaches to the balancer with likely 4 bolts and the balancer slides over the end of the crank and secured with a large bolt. Perhaps a few of the pulley bolts came out or sheared off in the balancer. I would think if the crank broke it would have dropped the balancer and pulley onto the highway.
Mark, I'm glad you're alright. At least our A/C repair worked...sort of. Heck, since your car was all done, you needed something to work on. I'll see you next year. Good luck
...another chapter in the "MCG hardluck Tour". now you can do that motor we were talking about when you install that...AOD... glad you got it home ...:Handshake ...Frank...
really I had some troubles this week.....nothing in comparison to this or a couple others. I have been furtunate the previous 7 years I had no "towing" problems that I can recall. Granted this is the longest haul for me to date....but well worth it.
Findly Ohio is not one of my favorite places, I've blown tires a few times going down I75, and a few guys in my car club (other than MCCI) have had speeding tickets there.
Sorry to hear that Mark. I'm sure you'll get it fixed quickly. Guess you shouldn't have hit it so hard with my hammer.
Haha..I'm thinking maybe I should have hit it HARDER and put it outta it's misery... I'm awful sick and tired of building up more stories to tell at Roundup/Gathering B.S. sessions. I was feeling really good last night when this happened. I almost made it from New Castle IN to Bowling Green, OH on about 9 gallons of gas, using the new tune I had loaded into the computer, a drastic improvement over any tank of gas the whole trip. The car was running at a normal temperature, the storms were all gone for the evening, the traffic on I-75 was pretty light. I dunno, I guess sh!* happens. I knew it was a risk driving all that way with a motor that had been rebuilt almost 20 years ago, but aside from consuming lots of fuel it ran pretty good, didn't burn oil, etc. Oh well...decisions, decisions...331 or 347? How about a chev..er...never mind! Oh...the weird thing? This happened less than a mile from where I ran outta gas like 4 years ago on the way home from one of the Roundups...
Maybe you need to take a different route. If you show up with a Chevy in there you might get to be the first car BANNED from the Gathering. J/K
...something about you guys with...purty cars...and no gas....Dan,Dave and now you... "all show and no go" ...Frank...:Handshake
I heard that... I always get skeered if the engines in any of my vehicles seem to be running "better than normal" or "exceptionaly smooth"
Yep, that seems to be the old adage. The car had for a long time had vibrations at various speeds above about 65 mph. It felt to me like it might have been the driveshaft. I had just been thinking to myself how smooth the car seemed to be running just before the failure. Maybe the end of the crank was slowly shifting before it totally broke off and that's what caused the vibration to be less. Also, looking back, those crank pulleys always had a slight wobble to them. This goes back to when it was in my old '77 many years ago. I always felt I should have investigated why they wobbled like that, but never got around to it...I dunno, this may be the price I paid for that laziness. Perhaps after 20 years of wobbling the end of the crank fatigued and broke? I also wonder about that stupid A/C compressor. The massive load that it was putting on the motor may have hastened the crank failure. I really had to tighten the belt quite a bit to keep it from bouncing....maybe I made it too tight? I noticed on the drive home that while it was on, there was more vibration than normal. It always induced some vibration, but this seemed different. I didn't like it, and that also contributed to me deciding to shut it off and bask in the 100 degree breezes along the interstate instead. Oh well, it is what it is.
It is kinda funny that I didn't spaz out about all this...but I really think it is because the whole trip for me was like one big preparation for a catastrophic failure of some kind. Hell, my wife called it weeks before I even left for the trip! When it finally did happen it felt like it was just supposed to happen. The entire drive I was in a condition of high alert, constantly paying attention to make sure I didn't smell stuff burning up, hear something breaking or see smoke. After I came to a stop on the shoulder I went and got my battery powered lantern and slowly lifted the hood. I was afraid of what I might find. First thing I saw was the belts all in a tangle and I thought: "Cool. I can fix this...I've got all the tools and belts I need....no problem!" That's when I noticed the the pulleys touching the fan shroud. I thought maybe the fan brackets let go and the fan shroud touched the belts and knocked them off. (it is a monsterous electric fan...yeah, I guess I didn't learn the lesson from the first electric fan failure, but at least this time I had a spare mechanical fan in the trunk!) Then I reached down and grabbed the pulleys realized I the entire balancer/pulley assembly was flopping around and knew immediately it wasn't something I was gonna fix on the side of I-75. I jumped back in the car, called Haggerty roadside assistance, my wife, my dad, and that was that. Oh yeah, I talked to Matt too for a bit before the State Trooper showed up to make sure I was okay. Someone from the Maverick/Comet community had to know of my fate...
