I happened to email JHM about the OD pulley one week before the official release. JHM said they were about ready to put them on sale and would have a batch coming in early the following week. I jumped on the on the opportunity to get one a bit early and ordered through their sales department. I wish I would have held on just a week longer though because I could have saved 50 bucks with the introductory sale, my bad! The pulley got to the house in a couple days as usual... just love buying from JHM! The kit comes with the pulley, new larger belt (Gates K070508), and 8 allen bolts
I started off using the ECS's nice video for getting the car into service mode. I did notice the guy mentioned the wrong torx bit size in a couple spots, but it could be my car wasn't put back together quite right after a fender bender!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aaPnqk...ature=youtu.be
Once the car was in service mode the pulley was easily accessible
The oem pulley is held in with 8 12-point bolts, but of course I don't have a 12-point set and I had too many beers at that point to drive. So I discovered that an 8mm allen works just as well to remove the oem bolts! You could be afraid of stripping them but the bolts aren't tightened down with much torque and the 8mm was very snug. I still wouldn't recommend doing this at home with your 60k chariot.
Here is a shot of the stock harmonic balancer out of the car. One of the 8 bolt holes is keyed and slightly further from the center than the rest. I really struggled to find the keyed hole on this car with 109k, but when we installed a JHM pulley on a friends new SQ5 everything was clean and the key hole was easily identifiable.
I recommend that once you identify the key hole on the JHM pulley you stick a bolt through it. The best way I found to identify the key hole on the crankshaft is to get under the car and use a mirror tool or just a small mirror. I attempted taking photos of the crankshaft with my phone and even video with a gopro, but I found the mirror was the best method. I recommend a friend lowers the pulley with the bolt in it from the top and you put the pulley on the crank while line up the bolt with the key hole. Then you can tighten the bolt to hold the key spot, at that point you can install the remaining bolts with Loctite. After you install a couple you can remove the bolt holding the keyed position and reinstall with Loctite.
View of installed OD pulley
From there I installed the belts and started putting things back together in reverse order from the ECS video. While I had the bumper off I went ahead and installed an RS4 syle grill from ebay. Comparing the photos on ebay and from the vendor sites I could tell the grille I bought was probably made in the same Chinese factory as the more expensive versions. I'm glad I took the gamble because they appear to be the same grille.
On my grille install I really wanted to avoid painting/plastidipping the crash bar because I didn't want to deal with rock chips in the future. My initial plan was to shave down the foam crash bar in order to get the bumper cover on, but first I wanted to see what the grille looked like with the black filler plate installed. Using a dremel I trimmed the filler plate to attach to the grille and once I mounted the filler plate I decided it was never coming off! I always thought the honeycomb grill needed a little something to break it up and the filler plate was just the trick. So I didn't bother trimming the foam because you can't see the crash bar with the filler plate.
Finished product:
JHM claims the pulley increases the supercharger speed by the same amount as a smaller supercharger pulley (~10%). But as we know the smaller s/c pulleys vary in size depending on the company. I am sorry that I did not have a caliper large enough to measure the JHM pulley diameter, but maybe Jake would be kind enough to fill us in on that figure :)
Revo was kind enough to let me flash to 1+ without using their pulley. They were concerned because they have not done any testing with the overdrive pulley yet, but I was confident with JHM's claim. Plus I figured with the number of people running dual pulleys out there my setup should be relatively safer.
Just with the stage 1 tune the increase in low-end torque was dramatic almost to much for daily driving!! The top-end felt about the same, but the low to mid range was vastly improved. When I flashed to stage 1+ I did notice a small drop off in the low-end torque which could be attributed to the ecu's "learning phase", after several hundred miles the low-end is increased but still not what it was with the stage 1 tune! I'm guessing Revo's 1+ was tuned with drivability in mind for the increased boost level's. Beyond that little caveat, the car feels amazing and much like any other stage 2 car I've been in. I do plan on creating a new thread once I have some actual data to show how the Revo tune is actually running with the JHM pulley. Hopefully that will be on the 16th when "andthen" invites me to join him at the drag strip. Thanks!
-Alex
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Originally Posted by colby7
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