| I'm going to agree that anything you do to extract more power out of your engine has the possible side effect of theoretical reduced engine life. 100k miles is a relatively good test, 20k miles is a poor statistic to quote. Mostly because low mileage statistics only prove that 1000 miles late the whole engine could have failed. The pulley is in essence part of the entire reciprocating asselmbly. In fact the failure mode due to the installation of a crank pulley without harmonic dampener is not the pulley but the journal bearing of the crank (and to a lesser extent the rod bearings). So when you talk about these things breaking, the hope would be to see at least 200k miles. If someone were to post that they bought a brand new Nissan block and it only lasted 50k miles before the bearings went out (under good maintenance) I'd be forced to say that there was a defect in the block. What I'm trying to say here is that the fact behind the removal of the harmonic balancer is that it will allow greater vibration of the crank. Now, mid 90's Japaneese manufactureing techniques used higher standards than their American counterparts. As a result, we could remove harmonic balancers in the 300ZX without a catastrophic failure of the bearings. However, the standards are +/- not exact. As a result one engine may have a crank that is slightly more balanced than another. Most likely you'll rebuild the engine because of a blown ring before the bearings will wear out. And in most of our cases we'll just build a motor when it comes down to that. At which point we'll be balanceing the crank or at least replacing the journal bearings. The real question for me would be to see dyno graphs showing the hp/torque gains from pulleys on a stock TT. In addition maybe we could get a rev/time trace from before and after the install to show that the engine in fact does rev faster. Something I've never actually seen done. On a sidenote, the inline-6 engine is more harmonically balanced than an inline-4, flat-4, flat-6 and V6. As a result, by its nature it will have less harmonic vibrations than flat or V series engines at a given RPM.
It's lonely at the top, but comforting to look down upon all the people beneath me. |
