i have a 94 B18b engine with direct port nitrous, my question is if the unorthodox pulleys are any good. i have the single drive one,or should i stick with my chipped stock one? thanks for any input

 

Bad. Not worth the freed up horsepower.. The crank is the harmonice balancer.. Could introduce crank walk in the long run.

 

A chipped stock pulley will be out of balance. Get a different stock one, or maybe have a machine shop try to even out where the chip is and then have it rebalanced.

 

i beat the crap out of my integra with unorthodox pullies for about 60,000 miles with no problems at all. all the guys at the shop run the pullies on their own cars, no problems at all... my opinion? good guys/ excellent products.

 

Do a search, this is probably the most debated mod of any you can do. It's very bad to replace a pulley which functions as the inertial dampener. Many have bearing failure soon after swapping them. Others never have a problem (why is that!?)

This is a very tough thing to figure out as everyone has a different setup and drives differently.

I have a theory that the "failure" is really oil starvation due to heavy acceleration (drag racing) or heavy oil sloshing (autocross.) One hint is that people say when it fails, the #5 bearing is okay, #4 worse, #3 worst than that... and #1 is distroyed, plus the oil pump gears look bad. It's hard to tell if that's a sign of mechanical resonance or oil starvation. Keep in mind the oil light comes on at 4.5lbs, so given the rule of thumb, "10lbs per 1000rpm" if that light EVER comes on, there's no oil. Worse, the engine may be starving for oil, but as long as the pressure is more than 4.5lbs, you'll never know you're killing the engine. And if a bubble gets into the system, guess where the pump feeds the system... #1 bearing, so it'll be the most damaged, and #2 less so, and #3 less then that, and so on...

The above is my pet theory, but I haven't yet installed the UR pulley either.... I waiting to see if anyone comes up with a better theory.


[Modified by kb58, 5:08 AM 8/1/2002]


[Modified by kb58, 5:11 AM 8/1/2002]

 

an interesting theory. do you think installing an oil pressure guage would answer that?

 

I've had an UR Ultra R for about 12k, and haven't had any problems yet with anything.

Funny thing is though, the ITR pulley doesen't have a dampener on it, and I have yet to see someone have problems with their engines due to the loss of the dampener.

 

It would help for prolonged lack of oil pressure. My concern is the case of oil sloshing, where the oil intake is only momentarily uncovered. That allows a bubble to get into the system, but then it immediately gets pressurized by the oil behind it. So even though there might be a nasty "air embolism" flowing through your oil system, the oil pressure gauge may never indicate it, since the oil AND air bubble are once again under the same pressure.

Having said all this, others have told me they've "been auocrossing for years" and having the oil light go on momentarily is no big deal. So I don't really know... like I said, it's a pet theory for now...

BTW, I reread the original post and want to clear up something. All this talk about "good vs. bad" pullies, refers to the crank pulley only. I've never seen complaints about accessary drive pullies.


[Modified by kb58, 2:49 PM 8/1/2002]