So stripping a 1.6NA and finally got the cambelt puley off the crank, to find its got a proper woodruff key and a keyway in the pulley, unlike my 87TD engine which has one of the key as part of the pulley that causes crank failure with serpentine setup.
I wondered is this standard or is this perhaps something some one has modded in the past?
Seems a bit strange otherwise that VW had a good design and then made it into a problem.
1.5 and very early 1.6 had the key separate. I'm sure VW much preferred to eliminate the separate step of putting the key in place during installation - when you make millions of engines a few seconds time savings adds up to big dollars, not to mention the chance of accidentally dropping the woodruff key or not installing it properly.
The keyed pulley worked fine until the AAZ came about. It was the combination of a much bigger alternator (AAZ went up to 120A versus something like 40A on a Rabbit) and a much more efficient serpentine belt with basically no give that causes the keyed pulley to fail.
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I think my engine I am rebuilding is an 83 year engine, but I think it had also been rebuilt at some stage. I say that because it was quite clean considering the age! It had been in a caddy/golf and then a Vanagon before I used it first time round in my baywindow van. Later on I put a JR code TD in my van, ran it on veg oil and did a serpentine belt conversion because I had those pulleys available at the time, with a 65amp alternator I managed to screw the bottom cam pulley, so was somewhat surprised with this engine when I found it was effectively designed properly!
Early 1.6s have a 22mm diameter hub for the sprocket to sit on and the woodruff key. Along about 82 or so they switched to a 30mm diameter hub and the integrated key style sprocket. It's not unheard of to find the early style crankshaft in engines manufactured after 1982 though. The engine in my rabbit is a JK block code, which according to what research I've been able to do on it means it came out of an 84ish Jetta, and it has the early style crank, and it had never been rebuilt.