Team Chevelle banner

Dyno Gods were looking down on us last night!

2K views 12 replies 13 participants last post by  Freddy Mercado 
#1 ·
Yesterday we had an engine on the dyno that made me realize how lucky myself and our crew have been. A defective Harmonic balancer on the dyno broke apart at 5700RPM and went thru the cinder block wall, busted through the ceiling and got lodged in it. It had to break apart at the perfect moment to shoot straight up like it did and not ricochet off anything else. I have always filmed engines inside the dyno room for the past 13 years (hundreds of them) and this has been in the back of my mind every time I'm in there....thankfully today I nor anyone else was! This could easily have killed someone....6" piece of metal flying around at that RPM yikes! This was just a little 383CI pushing 450+hp. I will say, we have used THOUSANDS of these balancers without an issue and im not bashing the company by any means so I wont put a name up....in this world sometimes S**T happens. The color difference where they drilled the hole to balance it is paint, but it looks as if that hole was def the weak point, possibly to deep or large in diameter.







 
See less See more
3
#2 ·
Scary stuff when parts go flying. Several years ago Tom Mobley and I were going to tune my 406. We took it out for a ride to warm up the engine. We were not even a quarter mile from the house when the fan came apart and went through the hood. Only was able to find 2 of the 6 blades, one was stuck in the hood another in the asphalt, the other 4 may have launched into low earth orbit. Had we not driven the car first it could have seriously injured us both.

 
#3 ·
Yep, we can have thousands without incident and then that one time we have an incident. Scary and dangerous stuff. Many years ago a friend had a balancer literally come off the crank on his Chevelle 396 and it ended up on the roof of a Carls jr. Another time I was standing beside a car whacking the throttle and the fan belt came apart and slapped me in the face pretty good. Lesson learned.
 
#5 ·
Gosh, I always ran a scattershield on the back of the engine, OK ! lets design one for the front. Someone was watching over you ! WOW !
Bob
 
#6 ·
I have had this happen to me TWICE! The first time I had a factory (non-clutch) fan lose a blade on the open road in the middle of nowhere. It flew downwards and hit the chassis rail and left a small dimple. I took the fan off and continued on my way. The second time years later I was coming home from work and it was it was one of those nasty flex fans with metal rivetted blades. This time the blade flew up and put a pimple in the hood. There was a lot of vibration followed straight away by lots of white smoke in the rear view mirror. The vibration caused the water pump bolt threads to strip (350 Chev) and allowed the coolant to spew out. I needed a tow after that and put some helicoils in to repair the block.
 
#9 ·
EXACTLY the reason I hate flying...anything mechanical is subject to failure at any time, even brand new parts!

Glad to hear nobody was hurt - I assume you're going to leave the damage as-is as a reminder and to show folks why not to stand to the side of an engine on a dyno...
 
#10 ·
We had a diesel engine on the dyno a couple years ago that had a rod let loose. You could throw a softball through one side of the block and out the other. Cracked the block from the pan rail almost all the way up to the head deck on both sides. I was pretty nervous when I was taking the crank out. Pretty sure that was about all holding the block together. Could've been real bad if someone had been in there when it let go.
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top