OK, after almost 600 miles of fun driving after my heads and cam upgrade, I went to start my car to go home from work and heard a bad noise coming from under the hood. With a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach thinking all sorts of things: rod issue, lifter or rocker problems, etc., I quickly turned off the car to gather my thoughts.

I popped the hood and did a visual inspection, and there was not anything that was visibly noticeable. I checked under the car to see if any life fluids were pooling and it was dry and nothing dripping. So, thinking that I needed to figure out what was going on, I started the car again and quickly went to the engine bay to see if I could hear and locate what was going on.

The clatter was coming from my idler/tensioner pulley. Here is a link to a video of it.
I shut off the car again thinking, "OK, not too bad. Just a bad/failed pulley." I look under the hood again, and noticed my A/C belt had come off and wrapped itself around my ATI harmonic balancer pulley with a piece of the dead belt between the main serpentine belt and the balancer. I tried pulling the dead belt out, but it was wrapped up too tightly to get it done. I then took some pictures and noticed it looks like the ATI balancer has the center part coming out of the outer housing a little bit. The arrow at the top right of this picture shows that, and the arrow in the lower left of the pic is pointing to the piece of A/C belt that is wedged in there.



I immediately thought that the 9 bolts that screw into the front to hold the balancer assembly together may have come out, or my ARP balancer bolt may have backed out a little. Another picture below shows that, at least visibly, I have all 9 bolts and the balancer bolt looks OK.





By the way, I put all new belts on the car when I put it back together, and I believe the A/C belt was a Goodyear Gatorback.

Any thought or ideas about why my A/C belt jumped, and from the pictures, does it look my ATI balancer is OK? I was thinking that the center/hub of of the balancer may be protruding a bit because of the A/C belt being wedged in between the A/C pulley and main serpentine belt pulley.

I'm having the car ferried to my house on a flat bed and will have to jack it up and get a better look tomorrow. Thanks in advance for any helpful suggestions or insight.

 

I don't remember the center hub of my ATI HB protruding out like that. Who assembled the ATI? When tightening the bolts on the ATI, it will have some resistance then feel loose again and pop in. The bolts should be tighten slowly altering from one side to the other using only a few turns until the center hub pops in. The center hub and bolts should be flush. I would check those bolts first and check for misalignment of the AC pulley.

 

I remember that process. I would turn each bolt in sequence until I could feel tension, then proceed to the next one to assure equal pressure/tightening of the outer shell to the hub assembly. I think I remember that if it was not all the flush with the center hub, the three bolts that connected the A/C pulley would not reach the threads of that assembly.

 

The instructions stated to use two bolts 180* apart and snug the shell onto the assembly. Then, snug the remaining 7 bolts. Three long bolts are used for the A/C pulley all of which reached easily. When I started the toque sequence on the bolts, I felt resistance along with a pop, which is normal. The pop I heard is the press fit of the shell onto the assembly. The bolts loosened up, so I snug them down and started the torque sequence again. After the bolts were torqued to spec, the shell and assemble were flush. The gap between the A/C pulley and HB were exactly the same distance as the oem HB.

My guess is that the shell and assembly were not in all the way causing misalignment between the A/C pulley and HB. If you have the oem HB, you can measure and compare the pulley gap and/or the total assembled height. You should also see a misalignment between A/C pulley and HB. Don't forget to use Loctite on all the bolts.