I was driving on the freeway and I heard a loud thunk. All of A sudden I had no power steering and I looked in my rearview mirror and saw the pulley fly from under my car. I pulled over and towed the car home. The bolts are still broken inside the crank pulley so Im going to need to extract them. This sucks. Im not sure how this happened. I torqued the bolts down with a torque wrench so Im not sure how i could have overtightened them.

Has this happened to anyone else.

 

wow that umm sucks...glad no accident was caused though

 

I've worked on cars a long time.

This is the first time I have heard of this.

 

I'm assuming you're saying the crank pulley came off and the bolts (or part of them) are still in the timing gear that's behind it. If so, you're not the first:

https://www.evolutionm.net/forums/ev...l-off-wtf.html

Some had their pulleys come off, some found the bolts backing out in time. I realized I had a problem when 3 of the 4 crank pulley bolts sheared off.

 

OP what year and how many miles?

Grahamab, I assume 05 evo so how many miles?

 

Wow... never heard of that lol, good luck fixing it.

 

Same story. Very weird. How much did you torque them to?

 

used to have problems with the crank pully comming apart on galants and eclipses, but to have the bolts break sounds like they may have been over torqued.what torque spec did you use?

 

Holy cow!! I think they were overtorqued at one time and stretched. Now with the same torque applied, they sheered over time.

Sucks. But glad no one got hurt on the road

 

how did you get the bolts extracted if you dont mind me asking?

 

Car had just under 27,000 miles when it happened.

I may have posted more detail in that other thread, but basically, I used these things called easy outs (or EZ outs or something like that). You'll find them with drill bits if you go to whereever you buy tools. I was lucky in that all three were fairly flat where they broke, so it was easy to just hit them with a center punch, drill a small pilot hole (the EZ outs specified a certain size), and then as you turn the EZ outs counter clockwise, they bite into the hole and kind of self tap until they start turning the bolt. Mine all came out pretty easily.

 

Wow, I've only heard of this if the pulley comes in contact with large road debris!

 

That takes skill, be proud! Or just torque them correctly next time.

 

Surprisingly enough, this happened to me when I used to have my mustang. I was on the onramp of the highway and BANG! It was a scary noise and feeling.

I drilled a hole in the bolt, then put a screw extractor in there to get it out. Then I bought a heli-coil set, re-threaded the crankshaft, and I was good to go.

 

the only good news from this is, the bolts for the harmonic balancer just thread into the timing belt sprocket. so if you can't get them out, just take the large crank bolt off the end, and replace the timing belt sprocket with a new one (you'll have to reset the timing belt though). and done. it could have been much worse...

what did you torque them to? they are small 12mm bolts so it doesn't take much torque to keep them in place.