Was hearing a strange whistle yesterday. At first I thought it was just cause a little rain hit my belts checking my oil level.

Upon driving on the freeway I began to smell burnt rubber. Turned on my cabin air and the smell was definately comming from my car.
Popped my hood and noticed my cog tensioner pulley was not rotating and was very hot. So I removed the cog belt altogether and drove home.

It seems to me that having an additional 5/8" spacer would be ideal so that the pressure from the bolt, seats evenly on the bearings of both sides, and not just one. As it is the bolt head seats on the bearing directly, and just so happens to be the spot where the bearing failed.

The nut was still tight, and the belt was still tight, so I don't know what could cause this to happen.
I read that maybe belt dust could of got in there and gummed up the bearing but I dunno.

Question: Can I use this belt still?
Suggestion on where to get a replacement bearing? call Vortech?
How do I keep this from happening again?
How can I check the condition of the other bearings?

Also turning the blower cog by hand everything seems smooth. Tends to make a lil more noise going in one direction though.

So what do you guys think?

 

pretty sure i have a cog pulley in my attic. so lemme know if you need one and ill sell it to you...not sure why this would happen other than the bearing just failed...As long as the belt is good with no cracks or cuts in it then yeah that is fine to keep using..

 

Wow...never heard of a cog pulley dying before...but I suppose it can happen to any pulley with bearings...maybe too tight?

As for checking other pulleys, usually something dosen't sound right when a pulley/bearing starts going and you can isolate it by taking off your belt and comparing the smoothness of how the pulleys rotate...it hard to isolate a bad pulley just with sound since the Vortech setup is inherently noisy....

 

heres what i have if u need...brand new never used...ill have to find out how much they are new cant remember what i paid for it, i ended up not needing it..think this is the pulley u are saying you need

 

Woot! Let me know how you want to handle this.

 

how much do they go for? where can u even order them just vortech? ive looked online and cant find it anywhere else for sale, id call vortech to see how much they are but they arent there at this time...find out if u can and it will speed things up, ill keep searching..

 

Yea, they're 40 bucks from Vortech. Mine failed too. Same place as the OP.

 

40 + shipping? ..do u have a link to find it online?

 

http://www.summitracing.com/parts/VOR-4FK116-021

40 + shipping? Pm me your address and i will mail you a check.

 

pm'ing now...