Alternative Pulley Set-up

[Strawdawg]

My son wanted to replace the 318 in his wagon with the 440 that I pulled out of my Challenger.  I said sure, piece of cake!  Yeah, right.  It's a piece of cake if you have all the correct brackets, linkages, pulleys, etc.  I did not because they went back on my stroker engine in the Challenger.

I spent some time collecting pieces, trying to figure out what would work, how to make it better, and all the usual stuff that we go through playing with cars.  I was 77 when we started planning for the swap and I turned 79 recently!  We are on the home stretch anyway. 

One of the things that drove me crazy was the pulley arrangement and it was complicated by the fact that he wanted to retain his AC once it was fixed.  Used pulleys are not cheap and the difficulty of determining what would line up with what boggled my old brain and his young brain was not doing much better.  It looked like that it was probably going to cost over $1k on the used market unless we got really lucky.

In the end, someone suggested we look at CVFRacing pulley offerings and we did.  We picked up a complete set including a new AC compressor for a little under a $1000 as I recall.  That included the add on option for the AC brackets/pulleys.

The install was easy except the AC add on was a bit tricky as the right spacers have to be in the right place and have to be substituted for some in the non AC part.  CVF was very helpful in supplying improved instructions 15 months after we originally purchased the kit and gave us some useful tips as well.  Kudos to them.

We started the swap around the first of April but it has been slow since I live out in west Texas and my son is 300 miles away down in Houston.  It would be done except for the virus restrictions, his need to work for a living, and my procrastinations.  I will do the wiring!  Maybe tomorrow. 

Anyway, here is a picture of the pulleys.  They used ribbed belts (two) and tension is applied with turnbuckles.  They also offer a one belt option mounted on a fancy mounting plate for about !800 for those when some excess cash.

[Brads70]

Looks nice! 

https://www.cvfracing.com/chrysler/

[Strawdawg]

Thanks for adding the link, Brad. I should have.