Mine arrived in a completely mangled cardboard envelop with many holes in it. I think a smaller envelop with bubble wrap or something would have been a better choice. Somehow though, the gears appear to be fine to my untrained eyes. Can't wait to get them installed. Thanks.

I would say the damage is from the gears hitting each other during shipping.

Pic 1 - Inner gear, chip on the lobe
Pic 2 - Inner gear, chip on the inside
pic 3 - Outer gear, chip on the lobe.

[QUOTE=TravisR;325920]Post pictures and I can tell you what is acceptable or not. ....QUOTE]

I think the envelope get routed through a postal assembly line, rollers grab the envelope and then WHAM .. ohoh theres something hard in there..... but heres my pics.

I got mine today.
The flat rate envelope was beat all to hell and the inner gear has a few edges on the teeth that were hit decently hard, although not as bad as the chips pictured above. I don't care what it takes to make them not work properly, I like the new parts I paid for to be new and as perfect as possible.
A box of 100 feet of bubble wrap is $25 at the most...
Overall, gears are nice, hopefully not compromised, shipping is less than satisfactory.

After seeing the pictures, mine are the exact same way. I just didn't really think a nick on the edge would matter much, but I am far from an expert. :dunno:

Mine have a couple small nicks like scubas. I'm just going to knock down any high edges and put them in. as long as they are divots and not speed bumps I don't see a problem. Obviously not ideal, but it will not impact the performance.

I really hope the international shipping had better packaging, or my gears are probably going to get FUBAR'd...

Were the gears shipped with the inner one inside the outer one? That is just asking for trouble, the perfect thing to damage one gear is a second one.

The gears were shipped with each of them in their own little plastic bag, they were not in assembled form in the packaging.

Casual observation, so someone correct me if I'm wrong. If these gears are that brittle as to several being damaged from shipping the gears hit one another, then they could break in an engine. I mean, one tiny piece ever turns loose, the pump tries to compress it, and bam. This don't look good to me. I think the gears are too brittle. If anything Id want to see the gears maybe "dent" not chip. To me, it seems they're way too hard and not tough enough. My honest opinion is these gears could fail if they're chipped. That's a place for a crack to begin. A weak point.

Travis, what's the rockwell and alloy on these?

Pat, I believe I used the term chipped. I do believe dent is a more accurate description of the damage as you can feel the burr as the metal has been pushed more than chipped. In either case, I am concerned about using these gears in their current condition.

Ding is an accurate description. Honestly though, for the price I am completely satisfied. They aren't a drop in item exactly, I knew ahead of time I would have to measure for clearances and possibly do a little massaging. These gears spin together better out of the housing than the miataroadster gears that I put in the last motor I built. Doing a little sanding and polishing on them is nothing, personally, to worry about.

I bought 2 sets for the price I paid for a single set of the other ones. They look great.

I know many of you won't be satisfied though, thats your perogative. YES, they should have been shipped a little better, I totally agree. Even the inner gear pictured above with the tooth damage I would run in my own engine. Just smooth it out with some 2000grit then polish it out.

These dings are nothing, I was expecting worse. I definitely underestimated the abuse they would take in shipping though. I was trying to keep the cost and time as low as possible, because this was a zero sum profit operation. I still managed to contribute probably 40-50 hours of time to it and got paid nothing for it. In the end though it is a product I'm satisfied with and I've now got it setup to produce a smidgen of profit on all new orders.

The flanges on the end of the gears are the seals and all dings on the edges are not going to affect anything. You reduced the pumping efficiency by .0000001 percent as you basically lowered the compression ratio of the pump by a very small amount. All of these are still drop in parts. The metal will quickly wear into specification. Some sand paper will take out the dings for the cautious, just be sure to properly wash the part if you sand it as you will inject lots of super hard silicates into your engine if you don't.

As far as the material specification durability is not a problem and dynamic fatigues should be a magnitude of about 10 less in this part regardless of little dings and what not on the part. You would have to have a much more serious fault to cause an issue.

Don't have mine yet, but I'm a little worried how they might look once they get to me in Canada.

Mine were assembled at first, there was an outline of them on the inside of the envelope. However, they did not stay that way. And no little plastic bags either.

We'll see how they perform soon enough.

Can you tell us what the proper cleaning procedure would be? Thanks.

Wash them off with some brake cleaner or similar solvent. Cleaning car parts isn't rocket science.

Neither is shipping an item with due care, but here we are...

No offense to the OP, most folks don't know how.


For small, heavy items (like this), a small box is more appropriate. However, an envelope could be used if each piece was packaged between two pieces of cardboard, taped so that they would become one small unit, and then wrapped in bubble wrap.


But, I am not helping anyone with that, so I will hush and take the abuse I deserve for offering the observation.


EDIT-- To add, while the damage is unfortunate, it won't affect overall performance. For that to happen, there would have to be damage across the whole width of the face of the gear to allow oil to escape.

Again, I apologize on shipping; I just thought that a piece of solid 4140 billet would be fine in the mail. I just never imagined these things would clang together with enough force to damage each other. I took a chance that they would be ok, I figured if they were plastic bagged that would reduce impact damage by a reasonable amount, and shipping these individually wrapped with bubble wrap would add probably 5 minutes to each packaging job 5*50=250 minutes or an extra 4 hours and 10 minutes to shipping time. I had already spent from 8 A.M. to 4 P.M. doing these. I had to go back a second day to finish up. An extra 4 hours would have meant I would have spent literally 2 consecutive days doing nothing but shipping packages. I want to help the community, but quite frankly I wanted to be done with it.

He's exactly right on the damage though. You would either have to have a gash that was deep enough in the tooth (.25 inch and the width of the tooth.) to significantly reduce the compression ratio or a ditch the full width of the flange. The viscous effect of the fluid does most of the sealing, that’s why the clearances are very wide on this part, and even wider in reality. I did my undergraduate thesis in high speed dynamic non-contact seals, so I do have some expertise in the area.

On cleaning and prepping oil pump gears
The less you do the better with sanding, JUST ENOUGH and no more. Do not try to remove any thing thats not going to messup clearances. Dints which are nothing more then burrs your going to do more damage then good by sanding. When rinsing use laundry detergent or dish soap, wash with very hot water then dry thoroughly. Immediately after you dry submerge in oil and rub it into the part. Vegetable oil or motor oil will be fine. After you’ve done this towel off the excess.

You can use something more caustic like brake fluid or power steering fluid instead of dishwashing liquid, but its a carcinogen, I personally hate smelling it, touching it, or cleaning it up. Instead of brake fluid you can use any list of paint thinners in the same way, but it is really unnecessary. If you choose this route you should still coat with oil after you are done

Real Problem with gears?
 

Uh oh, I think I found an actual problem. Yes, I had a couple nearly invisible muffed corners, but everything looks good. Except when I check the side to side clearance, it's ~24 thou instead of 2.4. The spec is something like 4, I dunno, but this is way way outside of it. certainly .020" is going to be a problem. I so far only checked it in my 2003 housing, but I will look at it in the 2000 housing soon. Also, I will mic the two gears.

Facotry gears in 2000 pump:
http://abefm.smugmug.com/photos/407740837_SqXoB-L.jpg

Billet parts in 2003 housing.
http://abefm.smugmug.com/photos/407741047_nHRyi-L.jpg

Anyone have any thoughts?


More oil pump pics:
http://abefm.smugmug.com/gallery/6435317_nSSFh
seems these are 20% heavier than OEM gears, so better get those flywheels lightened by 20 grams or so. :-)

Hrrm, that is interesting. We put all the gears in two different housings 94-97 and they both came up exactly in between spec. There is no way they should be that far out. Anyone else have clearance issues? That housing looks a little different from my 94, I'm not at home at the moment, I'll compare pictures.

The process spec for depth was done by using a high quality grinding machine which delivers great flatness and precision. Its not a machining error it has to be a wear problem or a part difference.

Now any definite clearance issues, those can be taken care of. The machine shop guarantees their work. So if we can verify that its not a problem with the housing we can get the parts brought into spec. I'm afraid the pumps may have changed though and our initial thoughts that we had one oil pump for all years is not correct. They gave us the clearance specs, but the actual dimensions could of easily changed.