Some old wounds get seen to for Esme

         Well its a long, long weekend here.....what to do.....Work on the cars of course!!

 Last time, after I did the carby rebuild on Esme, while it was idling away I did a little bit of investigating. I found something not very appealing and realized its been there for a long time but was not on my, "I want that in my car " list.

   The power steering pump pulley was offset to the drive pulley by a massive 8 mm ,that's 5/16" for our American friends. That is NOT good and would lead to a potential belt throw.....V belts are NOT meant to go sideways....well not for long. The biggest issue is, what it would wrap around on the way off ,before I would squeal to a stop, with lots if white smoke coming from under the hood. Not  the way to get noticed!

Impressive engineering !, its the little things that will bite you in the arse if you get careless.

Who knows why they didn't fix it at the start?

So As the pulley was bent and dinged, I opted for some new ones, as this engine is not numbers matching..

of course..350 in a 64 !!!! So I opted for some bling in the way of Aluminium .Well easy ...rip off the pulleys pack out the brackets, couple of hours tops....!!! Oh was I wrong. One bonus when I got the pulleys home was I got my 8mm back real quick.

The turned pulley had a narrower pitch than my steel one, which turned out to be a bitza two pulleys badly put together. there was no location for one pulley to the next so brute force and distortion had to do

All this did for me was give me a nasty vibration through the front end at 4000 RPM

The fact that the main pulley spigot didn't locate in the Harmonic balancer didn't help

Anyway, I couldn't get the the power steering pulley off because is had been damaged onto the shaft, I didn't have the correct puller,  in the end I had to cut it off the shaft !!!!

After the Exorcism

As I had a power steering service kit for Pearl and she generously donated it to her sister, I spent the next hours rebuilding the power steering pump, the pump is pretty worn in the chamber but it should last a few years.

pump bits

Pump assembled

The final outcome, not to shabby !

So then, I reassembled it all with a few new ARP screws here and there, marvelled at my handy work...

I should have realsed when I had to grind the bore of the harmonic balancer because I couldn't locate the new pulley, thats because the end of the harmonic balancer looked like the lunar landscape, from getting belted onto the crank. When it started the new pulley had one hell of a wobble and so did the balancer I hadn't noticed till it was all clean and not all banged up.

Original balancer with the bore ground to fit new pulley

Ok that's another day gone. Off to the speed shop harmonic balancer puller ....yup good brand...

another easy job for me ...... this should only take about half an hour to get it off, I bought  a nice shiny new balancer and front seal and soon it would all be good

OK, here we go take one, all set up, text book stuff, ha .. so easy

Gee  its going pretty easy ...yeah great , good puller.....? what ... oh stripped the thread

Remedy ? cut off the offending bit remake the end screw in try again , nickel anti seize a bit of heat and,

CRAP ......stripped again , didn't even budge a mm!!!

Remedy No2? Get upset I went to my work and made one that would work, from an M16 unbrako



Ausy Pete Special

Outcome?? it came off in about 2 minutes. I used the seal pick pried out the old seal and away we went . The original balancer was totally dead, had already had a seal saver on it and the rubber had extruded out, it was well past its use by date.

I found out why the balancer was hammered on there was about a .08 press fit on the shaft, I couldn't get the new one on either  after heating to about 70 deg.

So I opened up the bore .06 heated it up and it pushed on snug , a few good taps with the soft mallet and it was on





Mission Accomplished!!



Heres Esme and her zippy rendition (cut down ) of the old Chevy Potato...Potato tune I love, and a look at her new pulleys too

Not bad for 46 she still can hold the old 500 idle I guess the motors probalby 20 plus  years old ?

Well after doing all that, Jen and I took Esme for a drive down to the beach and had a break, it was a great end to the weekend



Oh, of course we had to stop for fuel, lots of it !!



Esme's first road trip




What a great view we got !

  I guess Pearl is getting a bit antsy At the moment as I am not paying her much attention, oh well it won't be long now.