Power Steering Pump Misalignment.

pfabricy

I've been dealing with a problem for many years with my power steering pump is just a smidge out of alignment and it causes belts to wear on one side, slinging hot rubber all over the engine bay, rolling the belt, and throwing the belt at high RPM. I have a fresh 360 block and fresh brackets. You can see from my pictures that if I put a straight edge across the pulleys I get a 1/8" gap on the inside edge of pulleys. Is this normal? Does anything look out of norm? Would a serpentine setup correct this or just have the same issue?

tufcj

It could be that the PS pump bracket or even the body of the pump has been tweaked from over tightening the belt. I'd try installing a new pump and/or bracket to see if it fixes the problem. The belt should deflect about 1" to 1.5" between the pulleys on the widest gap. You can over tighten belts. If you're not running A/C, move the belt back to the rear slot to put less torque on the pump shaft. Bob tufcj

pfabricy

I'm running a Sanden compressor off the next two pulleys grooves. Bracket is fresh off of ebay and I my old bracket had the same problem. I've had the same problem with two different PS pumps on the vehicle. Just ruling out all I can. I was working on a lot of Fords when I originally came up with compressor/V8/pulley combination and I'm wondering if I had a Ford pulley off an old 300 that had the grooves I needed so I used that causing a slight offset problem. Do the pulleys look like original AMC? You can also see from this picture I have the outer bracket spaced with some washers because I didn't have a spacer I liked. I didn't want to tweak the bracket by sucking it in without the spacer. Is there supposed to be a spacer there and what size? Thanks for the help. I do appreciate working through different ideas.

pfabricy

I found the problem. Outer pulley on the water pump looks like it was pressed on and starting to separate. PS pulley has a slight wobble. If I rotate them I can get everything to line up perfectly. Each pulley has a 1/16" of runout so if I clock them to the right position I can duplicate the pictures above. Clock them some more they are perfect. So now I need to find some fresh pulleys. Hmm... that serpentine kit is looking pretty good right now. It's that $740 that's a tough pill to swallow. Thanks for the help! Pete

tufcj

Glad you found it. I couldn't see if the PS pulley is factory AMC. There are 2 flavors of PS pulleys and pumps, 74 and older has a keyed shaft and pulley and has a nut on the shaft, 75-up is just press fit. The pulleys shouldn't be too difficult to find. I have Bulltear's serpentine setup to install on my 67 Rambler with a 390. I'm using a GM type2 PS pump and a pulley from March. PS brackets are from Control Freak suspension. You might post a want ad at www.theamcforum.com

Bob
tufcj