Mark: Great response....the acid test is yet to come....but you should tell them you posted the response and got favorable feedback from the forum....Do they need the entire clutch setup to balance it right or can they just stick with the flywheel?

I'm going to go look up their website becaue I might need some work done for my 930.....hurry up and get the Blue Angel finished up so we can hit the Salmon Falls run in the spring. Will you have the aero kit in by then?

Happy New Year buddy....Chuck

 

Chuck,

Did Mark rename the car? I always thought you called it the Blue Flame!

BTW - thanks for not calling me a dick head in public! You're getting kinder in your old age.

 

Chuck, they balance the flywheel by itself. I drove Salmon Falls yesterday. It sucked. My clutch is shot. I had to baby the car to get it home. I won't be driving it again until I get the clutch installed. I won't be getting the aerokit installed any time soon...between the clutch on the Porsche and the money I will be spending to restore the Maserati, I should be impoverished for a while. Happy New Year Chuck.

 

Yeah this is a really gray area, I could see it going either way. Personally I would try my hardest to get money back NOW, and not use that flywheel. You know this is going to potentially be a weak link in the chain and/or increase stress on other rotating bits in the engine.

Also, pure aluminum is brittle. It is susceptible to fatigue, in which over time small cracks grow and lead to failure with a cyclical stress less than the yield stress. The crack acts as stress concentrator and the crack will eventually propitiate through the material. The effective load bearing area is reduced until it fails under normal brittle failure mechanism. A common example of this is bicycle crank arms.

My assumption is the flywheel is designed with pretty tight tolerance in order to reduce weight as much as possible.

BTW im a big fan of your project cars. Wish I had the resources to do that myself.

 

Aasco knows a lot more about this than I do but I don't understand why balance would not be an issue. I've been told that a LWFW that's even slightly out of balance will create a harmonic which can lead to other engine problems. In the situration I heard about it was being blamed for a crank failure. Like I said, I have no expertise here but the idea that the balance of a flywheel doesn't matter just doesn't seem right.
Jim

 

Dan, the thought of a flywheel coming apart, a couple feet behind my butt, was what led me to send it back to the manufacturer. I trust they will tell me if it is not safe to repair it. Thanks, I'm lucky my wife tolerates the projects.
Jim, I read that article about the crank failure. It almost convinced me to not get a LWFW, until I read that engine had 12,000 track miles (someone pointed out that was the equivalent of running LeMans 4 times). I am definately worried about the balance issue. I hope that if the manufacturer takes off material, they rebalance it.
Thanks again for the input.

 

Mark: Is the shipper (UPS??) taking any responsibility in this fiasco? It's obvious by the picture of the hole in the shipping box that they dropped it.

My clutch is going out too...ran a vette last night and although I walked away from him, the familiar scent of burning clutch filled the cockpit. Kevin warned me that his flash is usually followed by a beefier clutch.

 

That is a good call Mark. Let the manufacturer make the decision, it's their product, if they can rectify the balance issue then you're the winner and can be assured it will be right.

 

I sent the flywheel to Aasco. The owner of the company resurfaced & rebalanced it. He also replaced the friction surface with an updated version. It is now essentially a new flywheel. I payed $23 to ship it to them. He shipped it back to me without payment from me. I called and he said he was going to charge me $12 for a couple hundred dollars worth of work. I still have not been able to get him to accept the $12 he said he was going to charge me. What a great guy and an outstanding company.

 

Mark,

Thanks for the update. Glad to hear it all worked out. What a great "customer service" story about Aasco. Because they treated you well, they are going to get a LOT of good publicity from it and they should!

 

Good ending, that will bring him some Karma for the new year!

 

Randy and company are good folks! They did a set of 2.7L heads for a rebuild I did in 2001. Great work, great pricing and good people, cannot ask for more!

 

Aasco has given me years of great service and parts !