With GM out of the picture, reman distributors were clearly still all over the place. This lasted several years , but the writing was clearly on the wall to be seen. Most of the reman stuff had already been redone(cycled) on average 3 times already. Well something had to give. If you got an average gm reman distributor you were lucky to find remnants of the original ID number left visible on the unit. Notice I said visible, legible was an entirely different world. This started creating all sorts of goofy problems… caps not sitting or registering on the housing correctly, etc.
About this time I’m thinking “ oh boy, this is gonna get ugly fast”.Then one day, someone sends me a new offshore Dist to fix.
Well this is cute. It’s all “new”.
It certainly looked like they were trying to make this thing look the part…since then I’ve seen better, and worse…and a bunch “in between”.
The one thing they’ve never done here, that I’ve been bitching about since day one…. What the hell happened under this pickup coil???
At first, and this is no joke. They were putting the plastic grease seals on these things shipped with no grease under them. That lasted about a year and a half. I probably worked on about 20-30 like that in a year and a half. People still had ready access to originals and somewhat sorta decent remans still.
Soon the things started showing up with no seal AND no grease. Still they were too new to see what was about to happen right off. About 3 years after these things started to be “everywhere” you looked, I get one in that had run about 15,000 miles….and the gentleman was apparently having some issue and wanted it looked at.
I pulled the drive gear off and pulled the shaft and out comes the shaft assy……
Along with it was the pickup coil…
The retainer clip….
And the bushing….
The rest of what was the housing was just kinda powdered up in what used to be the grease well cavity.!!!
This obviously won’t work anymore.
I didn’t really understand what or rather how I was gonna explain this to the guy. But when these things get hot enough they WILL friction weld the bushing to the shaft. And when that cools off, it’s good still….
Until tomorrow when you hit the key, and the starter spins the entire mess and now the housing becomes the top bushing until there’s nothing left. Wash, rinse, and repeat I guess. Pay the little eBay guy his 75.00 and start over…
It took me awhile to put numbers on it but I found that after one drives these things somewhere between 8,000-15,000 miles, one will have serious signs of imminent failure. I got one at work that had only gone approx 300 miles and it already has visible signs of distress at the top shaft.
Now, is it possible that one could design a different bushing and plate these shafts to engineer a viable workaround for this problem? Yes I suppose. But for 75.00 you’ll not see it happen.
These guys are good a copying things I’ll grant you that.
Hell, they copied the thing ringer down to the chrome plated upper bushing like what GM used on the last ones they made.
….but somebody either didn’t understand the engineering behind that desk or possibly didn’t care. GM was smart enough to drill two holes in theirs, these knuckleheads missed that memo I guess.
Of course no need to drill holes, if there’s no grease, which, you wouldn’t need if you weren’t putting in a grease seal, that you don’t need if you don’t install the grease….
The grease itself is a whole other matter. But like was said before. Don’t over complicate it, but I think one needs to understand why it’s there, for what purpose, and how to do it correctly.
I’ll get into that tomorrow.
|