Broken water pump pulley

[mopar jack]

Not an E body but same parts. I took my road runner to the Goodguys car show at Pleasanton yesterday and won the Mopar muscle award. Had a great time but on the ride home cruising at 70 heading into a hard right turn on I 680 the steerining went dead and I'm heading for the divider, fortunately instinct and muscle kicked in and was able to wrestle the car to the right and finally get off the road. So I get settled down and popped the hood and see the belt is thrown, no problem I'll get the tools and reinstall untill I see a ring around the water pump. I have never seen or heard of this so it took awhile to realize what I was seeing. see attached. The pulleys were purchased from Bouchillon and only have 2k miles on them. This incident has me rethinking the downside of the longer fast ratio pitman arm I have. I'm 72 and in good shape.

 

[Steve340]

Anything can happen I suppose as you have found out - but I don't think I have seen that one before.

 

[Daves69]

This incident has me rethinking the downside of the longer fast ratio pitman arm I have. I'm 72 and in good shape.

IDK, but I can't imagine that caused the pulley to fail.
For all ya' know it was defective from the get-go. Once off, I'd take a good hard look at both sides for evidence off a crack as new. Look for paint that has leached into an open surface crack. Then it fatigued till fail.
Darker areas of the exposed metal compared to much lighter of a fresh crack/break.

 

[heminut]

I seriously doubt that your pitman arm had anything at all to do with that! Like Daves69, I think the pulley was defective. The only other thing might be if the pulley was quite a bit out of line with the other pulleys.

 

[Xcudame]

The bottom of the "vee" in the pulley is a high stress area. I had a similar failure with my 70 Challenger years ago, but I figured it was fatigue from having over 200,000 miles on it. Yours was basically new. I'm betting it had a crack that went unnoticed from the get go. And one the crack starts propagating it grows fast!

 

[Challenger RTA]

+ side. Fan didn't go through the radiator.

 

[pschlosser]

Not sure the source of the pulley, but when you buy one at a swap meet, that may have once been pretty rusty, or had stress cracks along the bottom of the V, once it's bead blasted and painted, it's hard to spot.

Consider yourself lucky the secondary damage wasn't more severe, like @Challenger RTA said, a ripped up radiator.

I'm bummed, though. I'm in Santa Rosa not far from you, and I had not heard of the event you mentioned. I think I would have attended.

 

[mopar jack]

I seriously doubt that your pitman arm had anything at all to do with that! Like Daves69, I think the pulley was defective. The only other thing might be if the pulley was quite a bit out of line with the other pulleys.

The pitman arm comment was related to how hard the steering was and at my age with arthritis and various muscle issues I was lucky enough to steer the car with no power. I have to believe the factory built these cars engineered with some safety features such as a steering belt failure. Theses cars came with 6 or 7 inch wide belted tires and very little castor then many of us install 8 inch or wider radial tires, move the castor up as high as possible and add longer pitman arms.

 

[mopar jack]

Here is a pic of the pulley off the car. The break is at a point of the sharpest bend. The break looks like the edge of a small saw blade.

 

[mopar jack]

pschlosser, there is a mopar car show October 7th at Hagan park put on by Capital City Mopars.​

 

[challenger6pak]

I would send the pulley back. It should be thicker metal. It is a bad pulley.