Project Muscrate…
making chips!
Hi everyone and welcome back! First off I would like to congratulate one of my loyal readers, Jim Gorski. A fellow small tired Mustang man, Jim has been corresponding with me for awhile now and following along with the various suspension related articles I did last year. He has reported to me that he worked hard on the car over the winter and applied some of the techniques that I wrote about and is now deep into the 1.40 60 fts. on a marginal track and best of all he has now become a WHEELIE man! Man, aren’t those fun Jim?! Nice job and keep up the good work! It’s nice to get feedback from the articles I write so if any of my other loyal readers (all 6 of you!) have anything to share or even make a request for a future topic in a Tech article feel free to shoot me an email. Now, on to the meat and taters’.
Last month I attempted to demonstrate what is involved in balancing a rotating assembly. I want people to know what is involved in the cleaning, machining, clearancing, pre-assembling, cleaning again, and final assembly of a racing engine. Hopefully, this will help some of the “newbie” readers have a better idea of what to expect and wont bore the “veterans” to tears! I was going to cover the inner workings and principle of the TCI Rattler harmonic absorber this month but that will have to wait because I ordered the wrong one and there was no time to wait for the right one. So, I will cover that in a future article. For now I balanced the Ohio Crankshaft 4340 steel crank with a TCI elastomer style dampener (part #872007) that is SFI approved and a very nice piece of equipment.
 Here we see the Ohio Crankshaft getting violated by a .700" drill bit. I removed 118 grams from the front and 98 grams from the rear. |
According to the TCI literature “The TCI® Elastomer Balancer incorporates a super strong billet steel inertia ring for longer life and better performance. The high quality bonded rubber eliminates outer ring movement, eliminating a traditional weakness of previous elastomer balancers. For anyone needing an SFI tested and approved balancer, the TCI® Elastomer Balancer, capable of handling 12,000 rpm, is the answer.” Sounds good to me!
It is a 4 bolt pulley design that has a 28 oz. counterweight and required no honing for the proper fit on the crank snout. Some aftermarket dampeners are purposely made to the
small side of the size of the ID that goes on the crank and require a machine shop to hone the ID for the proper amount of “press” to the crank snout. One important piece of information about the press fit, you have to have it! If the dampener has a “slip fit” onto the crank snout to the point where you can basically slide it on with your hands you might as well not even use it!
To effectively do it’s job a dampener, or absorber in the case of the Rattler, needs to make good contact with the crankshaft. This is how it dampens or absorbs the harmonics and “hammering” of the rotating assembly. Eventually, when the proper Rattler shows up I will do a back to back test just to see what happens, if anything. They are both a 28 oz. design so I should have no problem simply swapping units.
