Follow Our Progress

May 17th 2004

Well, I should have known...  Just when you think you finally have your problems solved, something else decides to screw it all up again <grin>.

	I have been hearing a scraping noise coming from the front of the engine for about a month or so now.  Dean and I thought that it was coming from the water cooling pump - it wasn't.  Dean used a cool trick to find the noise.  He stuck a really long metal rod with a wooden handle on various parts of the engine and found that the idler bearing was grinding.  We did some searching around and ended up putting a new bearing in the old idler pulley.  The noise didn't go away - in fact it seemed to get much worse...
	After quite a bit of searching, we finally found the problem.  The main pulley coming off the engine had failed.  It's a damper, and the outer ring of the pulley had started to slide back and was scraping against the timing cover. We pulled the pulley off the Jeep and sure enough, nice and shiny from rubbing against the front of the engine.
	Here's a shot of the engine with the pulley removed.  You can see where the pulley was grinding away at the timing cover. The small shiny area above and to the left is where the belt had been rubbing against the engine because the damper pulley was slipping back and pulling the belt right along with it. We ordered a new pulley and seal...  The Jeep will be out of commission until at least Wednesday afternoon.

Not a great way to end the day - but at least we finally think we have the Jeep back in good shape.  I keep reminding myself that even with all of these repairs, we've spent less on the Jeep than we were paying toward new car payments just a few months ago.