The puller marked the inside of the damper when it was taken off (see pic) - does this mean the damper is ruined, given that it is supposed to be an almost-perfect press-fit?
Thanks folks.

 

These things happen. Don’t worry about it so much.

Rub the area with sandpaper to knock down the high points and reinstall.

 

Righto, so in the absence of arguments to the contrary, I shall smooth it down and send it. Any other thoughts / consensus out there?

 

 

In the Supra community, it's well-known that their out-of-the-box fitment is simply not to be trusted. Standard procedure is to hand-hone any ATI damper to fit the engine before installation. I've seen tremendous variance myself in ATI's dampers on Miata engines - some dampers are perfect, others require herculean effort to get pressed on and off.

 

Ah, I've only installed Mobius', and holy crap. Had to take it off once and I sand papered it a bit. Fit much more like an SPM damper after that and I was extremely pleased.

 

I've done two of them now. The first was a nightmare, a 2.5hr ordeal of on/off over and over again since the fit was so tight it was drawing the key up the keyway. The second slid on like I would expect it to with no issues. SPM dampers were aluminum hub which is more tolerant of poor press-fit tolerance. The ATI is steel and has the integrated crank gear which means you're press-fitting a much longer piece. The difference between a proper .001" fit and an out-of-tolerance .0025" or .003" fit is the difference between "that was easy" and "that's never coming apart again".

Between the pressfit tolerance issues that are apparent in their Miata dampers as well as their other applications and their most recent QC issues, needless to say, I'll never touch an ATI product again.

 

So if that's the case Sav, and next week you need to build a customer TSE engine, you would use what damper?

 

+1 - would be interested to know this. I'm currently running a 20+ year old standard pulley, I was in the market for an uprated damper but Supermiata no longer have them, and it appears that ATI are also fraught with problems... Is a new OEM damper really the only option? Any views on what BHJ's 'QC' issues were?

 

Trackspeed private label damper: an ATI damper with his own crank hub!

 

I would wait and see what comes to market in the next few months.

 

 

Showing ignorance... Is the Supermiata damper a re-badged ATI, or another, available choice?

 

It was made by BHJ. They still sell dampers for Miatas directly, but unclear if they're actually the same units.

 

Right, then there is this quote from Emilio:

As stated a few times in this forum, we did not ship any bad dampers to the best of our knowledge. We returned a bunch to BHJ for rework or scrap though. The percentage of dampers that failed our QC here was appalling. New issues popping up every other production batch, the old issues resurfacing. Besides the regular delays in getting adequate stock, I was paranoid that we would miss something and have a bunch of bad dampers bolted to expensive engines in the field. So we discontinued the damper altogether. If any BHJ Miata dampers show from another vendor, caveat emptor. And no, we can't coach you on our QC checklist

 

Great to know, I'm not sure I had seen that quote before. Good on him.

So no good damper option on the market currently...cough cough.

 

The ATI is still a good option but is now at skunk2 level with some modification required haha.

The supermiata damper i have was a bit terrifying to get on, though i think that had more to do with the previous owners installation and removal efforts.

oh hay