FS: Unorthodox Racing (UR) Lightweight Crank Pulley for 5SFE Options

[slavie]

Up for grabs is a UR lightweight pulley.

I believe this to be an MR2 5SFE pulley with both belts being 4 groove. 4" in overall diameter, 14.6oz or 414g. It will fit either a 3S or a 5S crank, as they're the same on the front end.

I had it on my 5SFE Camry for a few years working fine. It is an underdrive pulley in a 5SFE Camry, and requires a different belt (418K4 - I'll throw in the belt if you're purchasing this for a Camry/Calica).
Celica/Rav4/Camry 5SFE pulleys from mid-90s are all same.

It's a bit banged up (see detailed pics), but perfectly functional.
Please do your research and understand what's for sale here before purchasing.

$80 shipped OBO.



This post has been edited by slavie: Jun 22, 2015 - 5:29 PM

[slavie]

bump

Will entertain all reasonable offers.

[nsxtypeR]

It isnt a dampered one is it?

[slavie]

It's solid aluminum, so don't think so.

[slavie]

Bump

[RWD_curren]

I don't mean to crap on your thread, but those pulleys are terrible for your motor. the OEM one is balanced with your crank and this one is not so it can cause unwanted vibrations through your crank and wipe out bearings. the only safe aftermarket crank pulleys to use are ones with built in dampeners to absorb vibrations. don't get me wrong some people can run these for years and never have an issue, but I have seen these wipe bearings in too many motors so for me its not worth the risk.

[slavie]

I had it on my Camry for over 2 years and my engine is perfectly fine. There were tangible benefits of the pulley - faster revs would be one - and engine damage wasn't one of them. If I were building a motor to end all motors, I likely would have gone with a pulley better matched to the build. However, on a stock motor, this pulley was a good compliment.

If you "don't mean to crap" on my thread, then simply don't crap on my thread. If you're gonna make vague statements, better back them up - provide evidence that the pulley caused some kind of claimed damage and not other modifications which are often found on engines that self-destruct.

[mi645]

Is the pulley balanced? Yes or no?

[slavie]

Yes, according to the manufacturer - here's an excerpt from the their website here (also goes in depth to explain the pulleys):

Our parts costs what they cost not only because of our overhead but because we take the time to design and make them them right which includes the right strength and most importantly the proper balance. No other brand can make these claims. UR has been making pulleys since 1996...

Here's some more info from their pulley webpage here:

- Perfect balance, no wobbling or hopping.
- 100% designed & made in America.

This is a branded part, not an eBay special...

This post has been edited by slavie: Oct 23, 2015 - 9:35 PM

[nsxtypeR]

Pictures arent shown but its well worth the read!!!



Why you should NEVER fit an Lightweight Alloy Crank Pulley by tbdevelopments on 21 Nov 2012 03:19

 

I’ve been saying this for countless years to my customers not to fit the alloy crank pulleys in replacement of the standard Damper Pulley. Toyota did this for a reason and I’ve seen countless failures of the crank and quite a few with my own 2 eyes but up till now I have not recorded a failure, just did the repair as instructed. Well I had a customer come to me with a knocking coming from the bottom end of his GT4ST205, the knocking sounded very much like a bigend rattle so I advised that if this was caught early enough we could drop the sump and as long as the crank was in perfect condition and the journal measurements came within specs and a plasti-guage final check we could get away with re-shelling the conrods, which basically means fitting new bearings with the crank in-situ and just bolt it all back up. If done correctly this is a perfectly adequate repair and will give many years of trouble free motoring. Conrod bearings will wear because of a few reasons, Age and power is the main one which is the conditions that give the most successful repair of this nature. The other is foreign material or metal entering the bearing or lack of oil, these will typically damage the crank which requires a bottom end partial rebuild.

Upon inspection of this car I noticed it had an alloy crank pulley fitted (pictured below)





The sump was dropped and the bearings were inspected, #1,2,4 were all in perfect condition. #3 was in a terrible state, extensive wear and a deep grove down to the base metal of the bearing. This was the cause of the knocking. The crank was inspected and seemed in good condition but found a small lump on the top of the journal which you could just feel with your finger tip, at the time it was facing the top of the engine so I was feeling blind. Believing at first to be a part of the bearing stuck to the surface I rotated the crank to give a better view but found this damage instead. There was a fine Hairline crack which ran almost 3/4 the way around the bearing journal of the crank, and in one part the surface had pushed upwards creating that small lump felt earlier, and the cause of the deep grove created in the bearing. Damage pictured below







The job was completed with a new set of bearing throughout, a replacement crank that was rebalanced, journals polished for clearance and rebuilt. The alloy pulley was also replaced with a factory item and the customer collected his car, Which had an initial fire-up and running-in by my to set the bearings and 300miles of normal driving before replacing the oil and going back to normal full boost operations.

The car this happened to only modification was an exhaust system; boost was even standard so power wouldn’t have exceeded 260bhp at the most. Yet the crank had failed. To put this into perspective we’ve done drag cars running over 900bhp with standard cranks without a single failure or even bend. Some models for testing were also extremely machined to remove any metal we could for revablity, they were machined like pieces of paper and at still exceeding 900bhp still not a failure. All these were fitted with the standard damper pulley. Yet this example failed at 260bhp with a pulley that could control the harmonics which had lead to its premature failure.

The reason behind the failure was Harmonic Resonance Failure. Without getting to in-depth I’ll keep the explanation simple but there are a few good examples for the technical minds amongst us on wikipedia. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_oscillator

Basically everything in the universe vibrates, whether it is the human body, sheet of metal, or in this case a crank. This is called its structural resonance frequency. Now this frequency is best expressed as a wave, with its peaks and troughs. And if you can generate an additional wave with the matching frequency (so the peaks and troughs match) the amplitude of that wave will grow, or the item will vibrate with more force, it’ll keeps growing until it structurally fails on a molecular level. To put this into everyday context you need to picture a swing with a fat man on it and your trying to push the swing with your little finger, Normally this isn’t going to happen but if you can get the swing started adding the small amount of force at the correct period, just at the peak of the swing you can over time make the swing oscillate higher and higher. This swing is the oscillation frequency and at the top of each swing is the peaks of the wave form and the base of the swing would be expressed as its trough. Now if you continued to keep adding this small force at the top of each swing the arc would eventually get higher and higher until either the swing broke or the fat man fell off, this would be the expression of the structural resonance failure. To stop this you need a simple damper that will effect outside frequencies (in our case the engine) or crank rotation from matching the frequency of the crank resonance. Going back to our fat man on the swing the damper would be effectively stopping the outside force, (you with your little finger) pushing on the swing at the correct time, for example before the swing meets its peak point, This would do nothing to aid the swing and certainly wouldn’t add force the its momentum making it arc higher and higher.

This is what the Toyota standard Harmonic Damper Pulley does, it removes harmonic resonance from the crank and additional frequencies causing the failures were seeing above.

For curiosity purposes I went all over the crank looking for more hairline cracks and found another around #2 journal leading into the counterweight but it was only very small, around 1cm in length but if left unattended would have grown like #3. So to see how far the resonance damage had gone I caused a controlled failure of the crank by putting in it a press until it snapped on the cracked areas. The pictures of this can be seen below. If you analyze the pictures you will see there are 2 different types of metal texture. The shinier, almost polished appearance is the damaged caused by the resonance; this is a failure on the molecular level and as you can see it quite extensive in #3 and starting to spread inwards on #2 just being visible on the outside edge. The other type is a more harsh texture, this was good metal until the press finished it off, this is typical of a pressure break where the cast material of the crank has basically shattered and all this was caused by me so ignore that. But it does show the 2 different types of damage, and how close this celiac came to complete destruction, where instead of a hairline crack and a rattley bearing the crank would have snapped pushing the rods out the side of the block casing and the entire engine unit would have been a total write-off.

Before people jump the gun and say “well I’ve got one and running 400bhp for years” this isn’t a situation where it’s a loaded gun at your head, where you fire you will die. It’s a situation where failures can/normally happen eventually, ranging from a matter of weeks to years, and from standard power up to 1000bhp. It’s a device which doesn’t address the base foundation of structural physics where the original Toyota unit does.

I hope this has enlightened people to the dangers of fitting an item like this, yes you will save around half the weight of the stock pulley but this really doesn’t add up to any noticeable gains in performance or revability and all its doing it radically effecting the longevity of the engine

[RWD_curren]

thank you for posting this^^^ I did not want to have to explain all that..

OP, listen I was just chiming in on a topic I happened to know a little about. I thought I could inform you on something that could potentially cost you or another person a lot of money. it is not my job to research and plead a case to convince you. I know about these, if you thought what I said could be important to you it would be your job to research it.

unfortunately this is a problem with people, especially the youth of today. no one can take criticism or even discuss a topic with opposing views to potentially enlighten both participants. instead everyone gets angry takes it as a personal attack and becomes confrontational and therefore nothing gets accomplished. I have nothing invested in your car, and could not care less if or to whom you sell this. I just thought I could spread a little knowledge on a forum with people of similar taste in cars.

[mkernz22]

And if you guys don't know how to read up on stuff, the 5sfe has a stronger crank than the 3sgte. Which is why it can handle the pulley.

[slavie]

nsxtypeR, I'm going to play the devils advocate and point out just a few shortfalls of the article you posted. Fair?
- The author makes no note of engine mileage or history. Yes, the last owner may only have had few modifications at the time of failure, but who knows what the engine had been through prior to that?
- There is also no mention of what pulley exactly was used. Brand name quality part, or low quality no-name special? This is not trivial.
- With a sample size of 1, there could be plenty of other factors contributing to the failure, manufacturing defect being not the last of them. Could it be out of balance from the factory? New engines fail, too, you know.

Because the failed engine had an aftermarket pulley does not mean the pulley caused the failure. Correlation is not causation - just because two factors are present does not mean one was caused by the other. Maybe this chart will help explain the concept:

More info on the concept here.

With that aside, let's go further and pull up some information from the UR site (here) to address this dampening science:

The purpose of a damper is to protect the crankshaft from cracking due to excessive torsional movement and harmonic frequencies. A damper has no effect on bearing wear, it is the engines balance and build tolerances that control bearing wear. Dampers are not necessary in most modern engines because of the many advances in engine design but more importantly the quality of the materials and machining tolerances. Factors such as shorter stroke lengths, short piston TDC dwell time, no piston pin off-sets, forged crankshafts and engines that are balanced to blue printing specs or better (Honda engines are 0 gram balanced). Another important factor is the actual tune of the engine, especially when modified. Poor tuning leads to detonation which is an engine killer and no damper can stop this damage.

Now that these important facts are out in the open you need to figure out if your engine does or doesn't need a damper. If your factory crank pulley is not interference fit onto the crankshaft you do not need a damper. A great example of this is the 4G63 engine (1990+ Eclipse, Evo, Laser & Taon) which has its crank pulley mounted to the engine with four small M8 bolts. The 420A SOHC/DOHC crank pulley (Chrysler Neon, etc.) is interference fit but not because it needs a damper but because there is no key or dowel pin to hold the pulley from spinning on the crankshaft. Still confused? If you unbolt your crank pulley and it slides off the crankshaft you do not need a damper. There are a few engines where the crank pulley is sometimes slightly tight (VG30DE & DETT) but these engine also do not need a damper.

...

Many earlier generation crank pulleys on domestic & import engines have no rubber at all. We have samples of many of these from Acura/Honda B & D Series engines, 2.4L Altima, 1.8L Eclipse, 2.3L Fords, 2.2L Chrysler's, and 1.8L VW's just to mention a few. Some people will now worry that because we remove the NVH damper they will start to hear more engine accessory noise. The type and amount of NVH is unique to every car. As an example NVH will increase with aftermarket intakes or exhausts. OEM intake and exhaust systems use baffles and resonators to quiet intake and exhaust noise. Aftermarket systems eliminate these baffles and resonators to increase HP but they also increase noise from the throttle opening and from the additional size of the freer flowing exhaust. To most people the increase of in NVH makes for a sportier driving experience not to mention more HP.

Interested readers can read the whole article for more info.

Everybody is entitle to their own opinion, and I believe they are also entitle to hear both sides of the argument as opposed to being scared into a decision.

[richee3]

Guys, this is a For Sale thread. Let's keep it on topic. We can continue the debate here.

http://www.6gc.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=92263

[ricksfoster]

I know this is an old post, but do you happen to have any performance parts for 5sfe?

[slavie]

Mods, please close. This was sold long ago.

I know this is an old post, but do you happen to have any performance parts for 5sfe?

Old post indeed. The pulley has been sold awhile ago, despite bunch of folks taking a dump in this thread.

As for performance parts for 5SFE specifically, I don't have any that are for sale. 5spd swap is huge if you have automatic. Lightweight flywheel helps a lot, but also decreases driveability - something to consider if the car is a daily driver. Cams are a good upgrade, but kinda pricey - I got mine from Colt Cams and that cost me about $400 with shipping. Exhaust doesn't hurt, either.

Good luck with your search.