An off balance thread..

I've always been a proponent of 440Source stuff. I have lots of their parts and never an issue.

However, a few weeks ago I heard a clanging noise on the return road at the dragstrip. I Couldn't immediately see what it was, so I loaded it on the trailer and brought it home.

I found out it was the 440Source balancer that was bought new when I built this engine. The two halves came apart at the rubber.

I sent an e-mail to 440Source with a pic. No response.

If you are considering one of these, you might want to look elsewhere.

I'm not a fan of any rubber band damper. If you don't want to run a fluidamper I'd run the Innovaters West unit.

That could have got ugly......

So the bottom pulley stopped this from flying off ?

There have been lots of threads on what not to use from 440source


1. I beam rods. They quit selling them because of breakage
2. Rocker arms
3 harmonic balancers. I would not put one on an engine. Never.

I wouldn't say that this failure is due to a specific brand. For racing, it is usually a good idea to shy away from the rubber dampers, as stated previously. Use a good SFI piece, whether your class requires it or not.

one night , 3rd round ..Just coming out of the water box ..
Seen something fly past me ???

They ran up, told me to shut my car off , let my opponent make a single ?

I'm like , why ?

They said, something came off your car ..

What, burnout box guy comes over with some fancy , sparkly part of a Harmonic balancer

Said, not mine .. must of been his ?


I went up to him in the pits .. yeah, I seen it, I knew it was mine ..

And you let them give you a single ??

Nice

No, there is a lip on the center part of the balancer that won't allow the outer ring to go forward! It's made exactly like the o e balancer from Mopar.

Except for the 40+ year shorter lifespan.

Yep. Visually similar. In practice not so much...

Another aspect of this is that the damper actually has a job to do(besides providing a place for the front seal to ride and to mount the lower pulley)..... it’s there to dampen vibrations in the crankshaft.

It’s unlikely this dampers complete failure happened all at once........ so in the past few months leading up to what we see is the end result...... I wonder how effective it was at doing it’s primary job?

This is my main objection to Chinese dampers in general.
I find it hard to believe they are doing any type of R&D in an effort to come up with a piece that is actually an effective vibration damper in a HP application.

There was a member that used to post pretty regularly that had a 451 in a Pacer.
At one point he put an Indy headed 511 low deck in it.
After it had been running a short time he was commenting on how a lot of the motor hardware just wouldn’t stay tight.
Intake and carb bolts, alternator, pulleys, etc.

It had a Chinese made Professional Products SFI damper on it.

He ended up taking the Australian made Summit damper off the 451 and putting it on the 511...... and the bolts miraculously stopped coming loose.

John should that read would NOT ???

I think I can remember those threads years ago.
Referring back to Mark Gates' Pacer, I believe.

Fixed it John. Thanks

Bump for relevance since I was apparently messing up a thread about 440Source's customers not getting back to them. Irony.

Anyway, I went ahead and called again today and left a message, they called back and the guy said he couldn't do anything and Brandon was out but he would talk to him about it.

Their page looks open. Might be worth a post over there too. Or not.

Apparently Brandon is the only one that can make decisions on such a large issue. I guess delegation and opportunity cost are not part of their vocabulary.


Thanks, Zippy, I honestly had never seen that Facebook page!

I think people expectations of the longevity of a non race balance r has always been a bit off.

Its good you had no problems but you race your car a good bit, id pop the $400 or so for the race balancer and never look back.

You have a nice car, take good care of it.

This engine is and always has been limited to 6400 rpm. It is a tractor engine.

I may race my car but it is far from being a race engine.

Important: despite use of the term, a harmonic damper is not a balancer.

The SEMA damper standard (S.F.I. 18.1) does not rate a damper’s effectiveness, or certify that it works at all (let alone on a specific engine) - only that it fit the designated engine, and didn’t explode during the test. Their interest is limited to safety and qualify control, not specific engineering results. I couldn't even find a requirement as to how accurately it must fit the subject crank nose.
Any bonded rubber damper lives or dies on the manufacturer's reputation. MoPar fairly good on a stock engine for quite a while. An unknown damper (China and ?) may not only disintegrate (rim flies off) but fail to properly damp the harmonics (not the reciprocating mass) of the target engine. The rubber dimensions and characteristics are the whole works: the rubber insert has specific properties, including hysteresis, durometer hardness, &c. These factors are partially chemical in nature, and not easy to analyze or modify. What the rubber is made of (how much sulfur, &c.), what vulcanizing temperature, and how much it’s compressed to fit the space all play a part. I've never heard of any test for effectiveness, only for "how bad is the condition?".
The damper’s rubber ring will naturally decay with age, mileage, exposure to hot chemicals, vibration, ozone, and ultra-violet light, and become unsuitable for even a stock engine, let alone high performance or racing use.
Visible signs of damage and potential failure include:
» the rubber is partially missing
» the rubber is discolored gray or “chalky”
» the rubber has surface cracking
» the rubber has been partially extruded
» the damper rim is dented or bent
» the damper is loose on its hub or on the crankshaft nose
» the damper rim has excessive run-out (“wobble”)
» a “squeaking” noise that defies detection
If you have any doubts about the integrity of a factory damper, remove it (and rebuild it, if you wish).
Even a high-mileage (but apparently undamaged) damper has lost some effectiveness due to hardening of the rubber parts, which also changes its frequency range. Even if not damaged, it’s not doing the job if it doesn’t “float” the inertia ring as it was designed to do, which is at specific RPM points (not continuously).
The bad ones I’ve seen that we know slipped (the engine won’t run with the ignition timing marks aligned, but seems OK if you tune it “by ear” and check for pinging) all look damaged, but this obviously only catches them when they’re toast.
If you can rotate the outer rim on its hub more than a few degrees with a strap wrench, &c., it’s gone.

I bought the SFI fluid damper below at 440source and it has been tested...

http://store.440source.com/Fluid-damper-SFI-Certified-Black-New/productinfo/200-1024/

Most tractors I work on only rev to around 3000rpms, so you are a little higher then that. Most people learn the hard way if you are building a performance engine don't cheap out on parts. I have seen enough failures on offshore parts to either stick with good oem parts or pony up for the name brand stuff.

I'm 99% sure that's the model another board member had fail during dyno testing.

What damper is on the engine now? I suspect 6400 is way past what Chrysler would have expected for an OEM 440; Gen 2 426 Hemis had a different damper than an RB wedge.

it has been tested
Yes, it didn't blow up.
A solid hub would also pass.

Again: except for accepting the manufacturer's word, there is NO WAY to tell if the damper is tuned to work at the specific RPM points ("harmonic orders") that are sensitive in your engine. A typical V8 has several, at least one occurs below any RPM you would use constantly, and some way above your RPM limit. A V8 crank with 400 Hz frequency (way above L6, below V6) has orders at 24,000 RPM, 12,000, 8,000, 6,000, 4,800, 4,000, 3,429, 3,000, 2,667, 2,400, 2,182, etc. but not all are equally destructive.
There is a reason why all car manufacturers make a different damper for each engine. They also make some for different applications for the same engine: the Ford 289 4 bbl. 220 hp damper will not work on a 271 hp engine since the bigger cam needs damping above the 220's damper range.
What affects damper design? It's a long list and has nothing to do with power, compression ratio, rod geo, or balance factor.
The factors that determine the natural frequency of vibration include crankshaft length (number of cylinders in a row, number of main bearings), weight, and stiffness (rod and main journal diameters, stroke length, journal overlap). The Young’s Modulus of Elasticity (stiffness) of most steel material (forged, billet) is very similar so 4130, 4340, and mild steel are almost alike - but cast iron is different.

That's why they have SFI dampers for racing. It's not a good place to save money, imho.

An update to this: 440Source did offer to replace the balancer with a new one today. As I'm not excited about having the same issues and admittedly making more power than originally intended, I politely declined.

I do appreciate them getting back with me.

Couldnt send it back for “store credit”?

Good - they are more likely to give you credit than a refund.

So many of these aftermarket dampers fail after such little use it's ridiculous.
I've run stock old dampers on a few engines I raced and never had a problem.
The only one I had fail was a BHJ damper...it replaced a stock damper b/c I was worried about it, lol. BHJ repaired it, but refused to discuss the issue.

The car crosses the 1/4 mile stripe at under 5200 and is rev limited to 6400. Last Fall as a stopgap solution and so I could move the car in and out of the garage over Winter, I installed an OE balancer. It is most likely going to stay for a while.

I'd leave it on there too. It's 100% better than the cheap dampers out there...as you know.
ATI, Fluidamper, or Innovators West is all I'd use if going w/ a new one. Never used an IW piece, but heard they're good.

I was scrolling through this to see what you ended up replacing it with, as I sometimes worry about my stock one...

Looks like I'll stick with the 50 year old unit...

We can thank General Motors for this problem. They were the ones sending them into the grandstands hitting people

Buddy of mine blew one off a 289 Ford at Assumption. It made a hole in the track you could drop a golf ball in to, and a piece went through the wall of the concession stand and hit a lady in the butt.

Bob Glidden had a cast dampener on one of his Ford motors in 1980 explode on the starting line while testing and almost ruin the complete front end on his Fairmount Pro Stocker at the 1980 NHRA World Finals at Orange County raceway after he lost the sponsorship with Mopar when they went bankrupt the first time in 1980 .
That is the main reason NHRA started requiring SFI dampeners after that
I've had the outer ring come off of one of my old 1957 392 hemi motors while driving it, luckily the lower pulley and belts kept it on

What about the BHJ failed?

The aluminum hub ones I've seen fail crack one of the webs or fingers

I was working the starting line at Jackson County Sports Park at a NHRA points race. My buddy Warren was standing next to me. A Chevy Camaro modified car was doing a burnout and Warren fell over and the camaro went silent. The idiot had drilled holes in a stock dampner for a crank trigger. It exploded part of it was embedded in the concrete starting line and part of it took a chunk out of Warren's prosthetic leg. We were lucky that day.

I used to run the BHJ aluminum hub dampner on my stocker engines still have one in the shop. Never a problem.

So why did you raise such a fuss in public?

The same reason they did about their vendor not getting back with them! I emailed them with pictures and never heard anything.

It does irritate me that this happened and they need to be made aware that there is a problem with this product.

This original thread was not "making a fuss in public" but rather serving as a warning to others that were considering this product.

I've always had a positive experience with everything I've purchased from 440 Source. But clearly, there are things they sell that I wouldn't even consider buying, regardless of the savings.

I picked up a used Innovators West balancer from a friend, because it was marked "BBC" at a swap meet, and then wouldn't fit on his 454. Gave him 100$, twenty years of flawless service.
Have one of those TCI "Rattlers"...darn thing welded itself to the snout of my 440 crank, tried everything to remove it, no luck.
I've got an SFI approved "PowerBond" on my stroker small block that has held up great the last 6 years.

It slipped the outer ring over an inch after my first trip to the track w/ it. Called them, sent it back, got it back a week or so later "repaired". Tried calling them to talk to someone about it and they wouldn't talk to me. I sold it cheap.

IM TRYING TO SELL A BB FLUID DMAPER FOR ONLY $100.00...….LOL

ID NEVER USE A CHINESE DAMPER, THERE ARE OTHER PLACES TO SKIMP.

I DO USE 440 SOURCE OIL PAN AND VALVE COVERS, VERY HAPPY WITH BOTH...

To update this, I replaced the stock balancer with a Trickflow piece.

Very happy with it as it fit perfectly and aligned with all the pulleys.