The Hydronaut's Descent Into Confusion

Seeing as it's now fall, it's only appropriate that the lights upstairs don't stay lit for as long or shine as brightly as they are during the parts of the year up here that aren't crushingly miserable.  Today I'll be going into detail about an idea that was birthed in late spring, and had a spastic fit of stupidity during the last two days.

If you've read this log for a while, you might remember the bit about trying to get the Saginaw ps pump to fit with the late model 4.0L intake and exhaust, my giving up on that, deciding to go with a Type II pump, then finding a problem with finding a v-belt pulley to fit a Type II.  If not, I hope that was all the exposition you need to be caught up.

Earlier this year, I discovered factory configurations that used a v-belt pulley, though only discovered the pump had a different shaft diameter, and thus pulley bore, after going to the yard, getting said pulley, and failing to fit it to my Grand Latte pump.  I'll spare you a lot of absurd back-and-forth and just get to the details in a sec.  Just let it be known that the info I'm covering was hard won through 4 different trips to the yard, at least 15hrs of online research spent picking out any real information about these pumps I could piece together, and at least 3 parts searches for what would ultimately turn out as false-positives for pulleys that would fit the Jeep pump.


The Type II pump comes in two flavors.  One is what you encounter all the time when you're pinching parts from newer Jeeps.  It usually (but not always) has a composite reservoir that's integrated to form an assembly with the pump body, and can be kind of a pain in the ass to check and fill if you're not used to the classic ham can saggy pump.  The shaft of this group of T2 pump measures out at 0.662", though like it's sibling type, is speced in some weird-ass base-10 system of measurement used by people who think they're smart until they have to eyeball the thread pitch of a small fastener.

The flavor many crave, particularly for racing applications, is normally hunted for in the carcasses of expired Corvettes, but can also be found in Neons made between '98 and '00.  I'm not certain that they're 1:1, but they are the same general variant of Type II pump.  More often than not, these pumps have an external reservoir, which will aide in keeping your steering sauce cooler, while also providing several more points of potential flame hazard leaks.  The snout on this pig measures at 0.709", at least by my micrometer reading of the one I've got.  You can ask the internet about it's metric measurement.

Like some of the internal components of these types, the pulleys are not interchangable.  Not all is lost, though!  Luckily, the fatty wagon's ps pump shaft is a smaller diameter than what comes in the Neon.  That gives us the obvious option of turning out a sleeve to adapt the larger bore pulley, though there also seems to be another, more labor-intensive option that I'll cover in a sec.

Sleeving the Neon pulley is what I've determined to be the best option for giving a fatty wagon pump the v.  The reasons for this are:

• Cost.  You can find aftermarket v pulleys for the GC pump online.  I just want to make that clear.  These exist, and carry at least one of the words "performance", "team", "track", "speed", and/or a synonym of any of these in the company and/or product name.  Don't be surprised that they're priced accordingly.  I may be dumb, but I ain't dumb enough to pay $80-$200+ for a goddamn pulley.
• Availability.  The aftermarket parts are guaranteed to be in stock -- for the website you're buying it from.  You may be able to see the website on your phone, but trust me when I say that the part is actually physically located very far away from wherever you are when you need a ps pulley.
• Serviceability.  The sleeve can be reused.  Even if it gets damaged during extraction, it can be turned by hand with a file and a power drill, then pressed in with a bottle jack no matter where you are.  Time, metal scrap, and red loctite are all you need.  The pulley is the easiest part, since there's no apparent shortage of dead Neons.

I may post an update showing pictures of the sleeve process in the future, but you can probably figure out if you need to.

The pain in the ass option I mentioned before is more of a mental exercise than a practical course of action.  It definitely falls waaaay short of the level of serviceability the sleeve option provides, but check this out:

Left: grande pulley - Right: Neon pulley

So the left pulley is a composite, with a space plastic body and a boring, Earth metal center.  The right is 100% Earth metal, but is still two parts: the center and the rest.  From the looks of things, it would be possible to turn out the center portion of the left pulley on a lathe, cut the weld out and press the center from the right pulley (or turn it out), swap the left center to the right body, then weld it up.

To hell with that.