Griptec Supercharger Pulley Review

Owners of supercharged SHOs have long had to deal with belt slip and loss of boost and premature belt wear, or worse, premature main bearing wear due to over tightening the idler pulley to combat belt slip.

Years back a company by the name of Reichard Racing made some novel pulleys diesigned to eliminate belt slip. They were expensive. And that company is out of business.

Today, what I think is an ever better solution is available. Enter Griptec. They do something called a micro-ablation process that machines small grooves into the surface of the pulley ridges and valleys. I have read great reviews. Hopefully this will allow supercharged SHO owners to keep belt slip to a minimum while not having to over tighten the idler pulley. Question is, will they work for our application? Answer - I hope so.

I ordered a pulley from a Mustang source, which means the offset will be backwards for a SHO. No problem since you just have to flip the pulley. Problem is, like the Reichard Racing pulleys of old, these are designed for CW rotating SCs, not CCW. You can see how the grooves have a slant. Since the Griptec is a modular design, I was hopeful I could just swap the hub direction and go to town. But the pulley is machined to work on the hub facing a certain direction, so while I have the correct offset I need when I swap the hub, the grooves are facing wrong direction. If I swap the pulley direction then the offset is wrong (and the pulley is not supported correctly).

My only option is to remove the ability to swap out pulleys without removing hub. Because of the modular design, a cool feature of the Griptec pulley system was the ability to swap pulleys easily, but I have to give that up if I want the grooves facing the right direction. No real loss, as I only have one Griptec pulley anyway.


Long story long, after I swap in my forged engine and larger T-Trim, I’ll finish the story with the actual performance of the Griptec pulley. I ordered a 3.12, which should be good for 15psi or so. Stay tuned!

 

Good for "a" what? Way to leave us in suspense...

 

ha! Weird! Fixed it.