Posted: Jan 30 2006 at 6:05pm | IP Logged

For the past several months I have been communicating with Unorthodox Racing to develop an Underdrive  pulley for the NISSAN 5.6liter V8. Now, finaly they have decided that they will be creating a new underdrive pulley for the TITAN / ARMADA.

    This "Underdrive pulley" is a lightweight billet aluminum crank shaft pulley that happens to be a fraction of the size of the stock heavy iron pulley. The reduced size "Underdrives" the accesories ie, water pump, alternator, and powersteering. This frees up power from the engine that was being used to operate these components without compromising electrical, cooling, and steering reponses.

   My personal experiences with the underdrive pullies have been nothing but positive. Power increse numbers are not available yet for the TITAN engine, but as for the NISSAN VG30DE engine(3.0 V6 for 300ZX non turbo/inf. J30), increses of 18 HP were achieved in stock trim and 24 HP for the 300ZX TwinTurbo in stock trim. My assumption is that this pulley should yeild a 18-25 HP gain in stock trim for the TITAN.

   Please visit-- www.unorthodoxracing.com For more info on these products.

Posted: Feb 12 2006 at 6:17pm | IP Logged

blackjack7 wrote: any idea when that will be available and prices range?

Hopefuly this summer/fall. Probably around $180

Posted: Sep 01 2006 at 10:42pm | IP Logged

Eh, no biggie. Pop off the shroud, unbolt the brackets, drain the coolant for re-use, pop off the hoses and pull out the radiator. 10 min job to do the radiator.

Will take some muscle to remove the crank bolt, best if an impact gun were used. I've installed about a dozen of these pulleys on 300ZXs and they are very cramped, yet still easy to install.

Posted: Oct 01 2006 at 3:31pm | IP Logged

UPDATE: Unorthodox Racing has informed me that the production of the underdrive pulley will be set back due to design issues and balancing problems with their original solid prototype.

The original prototype was a lightweight, smaller in diameter, solid aluminum pulley. This design has been superb in many vehicles since most modern vehicles especially those of which have high end engines are well designed and balanced to have minimal to no harmonic resonation throughout the rev range.

Since the TITAN was not designed for racing or high performance, the internals of the 5.6L V8 are not balanced enough to reliably have a non dampened pulley on the engine, so UR is designing a new underdriven harmonic balancer that will be slightly heavier than the original prototype, but still significantly lighter than the stock pulley, and smaller in diameter to "underdrive" the accessory/fan belts to release power from the engine while still keeping the electrical charging system from being compromised.

On that note, I just received an e-mail from ASP racing, saying that they have dumped their underdrive dampener project due to them not wanting customers to deal with the radiator removal to install the pulley.  Their loss.