You know how when you spin a top it goes through various types of "spinning", sometimes it's nice and stable and there's no discernable movement of the axis, sometimes it starts to wobble when it gets slower, sometimes when it's spinning REALLY fast it starts to shake violently.

That violent shaking is called harmonics, it happens to the crankshaft of your car, the whole point of the HARMONIC DAMPER (usually called the "crank pulley") is to reduce that violent shaking so it doesn't eat your crank bearings. A lightweight pulley has no harmonic damping, you can expect to reduce the life of your engine by 25-50% depending on how it's driven.

There are literally zero race cars that use lightweight pulleys, they use aftermarket ATI or Fluidampr pulleys because the more power, the more rpm, the more harmonics. Those two pulleys are designed specifically for reducing higher harmonic loads.

 

Money saved, thanks!

 

Got another one....upgraded camshafts (exhaust and intake). Pros/cons? A new timing chain and tune looks to be required with this internal mod. Is this a bad idea for a higher mileage car? I would think the significant HP increase puts stress on other drivetrain components. Should anything else be replaced/upgraded during install?

 

Cams are EXPENSIVE, personally I think that once you have all the low hanging fruit (better dual cold air intake, HFC/test pipes, exhaust, tune, 5AT would also add transgo shift kit) then the next thing to spend you money on is a Vortech/Stillen/GTM? supercharger kit.

Cams are like $2500 and will get you about 30whp.

A Vortech costs $5k and will get you about 100whp.

The dual cold air intake with HFC (and a muffler delete which isn't terrible on the HR) and a tune is about $1500 and a solid 40whp on the HR engine.

I wouldn't worry about cams until after you went forced induction.

I don't know if GTM is still making supercharger kits, apparently there was a lot of broken promises and late deliveries with people ordering gear through them and they got a fairly bad reputation for a while. Might be better now, don't know.

 

👍 All low hanging fruit including TransGo and possible grounding kit are scheduled for March. I'm just looking down the line at this slippery slope. A SC kit with its 100 whp increase sounds incredible. Brakes, suspension, tires will need to be done also to cope with the added ponies. Those can be big dollar items. Maybe a 2023 project.