Prorac1

iTrader: (4)

Hopefully, through my trial and error, this thread will help someone else in the future. I have a tube chassis car with a strut front end. The engine plate works as a sudo-strut tower brace, so its necessary. I dont want to run an electric water pump (although I did on my Big Block Chevrolet and it worked well) mostly because of price and the fact that im going to drive the wheels off of this thing and want to be able to go to autozone to replace a water pump if need be in the middle of BFE.

With that being said, the front plate is made of .25 thick aluminum. I am currently working with the truck crank pulley and waterpump, and I dont see that working because the belt currently rides about .125 from the back edge of the waterpump pulley, and I dont have room to push the pulley back because of how close it already rides to the water pump already.

So, heres what im thinking. The replacement waterpumps for, say, a 1999 camaro AND corvette use a universal pulley that is EXTRA wide so that it can be used on both spacing accy. drives. If I use the longer (from block) camaro crank pulley, and the universal camaro waterpump mounted to the block with the .25 engine plate, It should give me enough flexability for belt routing on the waterpump pulley.

NOW, heres another area of concern, the tensioner. Do the waterpumps ALL use the same tensioner and the tabs on the water pump vary, or are all the waterpump castings the same and the tensioners are differant? Any advice is appreciated. Thanks, Eric L

garys 68

iTrader: (1)

I saw another post here that slid the F body pulley farther off the shaft to reach the truck distance. I put a truck pulley on the f body water pump for the correct truck spacing. You could slide that farther on to the shaft.
The truck and f body have the same tensioner mounting boss distance from the block. The belt offset is determined by the tensioner design. If you're using truck crank pulley, water pump on a 1/4" plate, a truck tensioner will be too far out. You could try thr f body tensioner with a couple 1/2" spacers.

Prorac1

iTrader: (4)

Thats why im thinking about using the universal camaro, corvette pump with a camaro crank pulley. They are within 3/8 of an inch of each other and that puts me REAL close to where I need to be, espically with the universal pulley. Than I can try differant combinations of tensioners to get what I need.