Hello again everybody,

I am absolutely losing my mind over this and hoping someone has an idea of what’s going on here.

I bought a brand new water pump and pulley both from Atkins Rotary at the same time. Both were for a S5 Turbo so unless I was sent a wrong part, parts are correct. My old water pump and fan clutch were still stuck together so I couldn’t compare much but the pulleys look to be the same size.


The water pump goes on and the hub/bearing spins perfectly fine. As soon as I try to put the pulley on, it is just grinding like CRAZY. the inner lip of the pulley was losing paint so after digging thru some forums I saw that it is “normal” to have to grind down either a little bit of the casting from the pump or maybe even some of the inner lip of the pulley.

Well, I grinded both down. WAY more than I wanted to (not so much that the pump is damaged.. but certainly closer than I wanted) and I’d say it maybe fixed it a tiny bit, to where atleast now the belts didn’t slip off (i haven’t turned the car on so this is just spinning by hand)

I decided to just put everything else on and see what happens. So I install the eccentric shaft pulley and the A/C pulley obviously sandwiches the water pump pulley a bit.. Well after doing that I could no longer spin the pulley by hand which is already concerning but I kept going just out of curiosity..

I secured the fan clutch to the studs but this is where I started to get nervous. When I took it apart the first time, I remember having to hold a wrench on one nut and spin another so the entire thing didn’t spin on me. Not this time. Even with the pressure of a wrench tightening those nuts down, it didn’t spin. It didn’t even spin and grind, just sat completely still.

I haven’t done anything else from that point. I’m not sure what to try next.. It seems to be sitting straight and I can’t possibly imagine how I could be putting this together wrong. I don’t want to crank it and see just what all breaks, although that seems to be where my mind is starting to go here lmao.

Thanks in advance for any insight you might be able to provide…

 

In the past, there have been a few similar threads on this same topic. Turns out that on some pumps the casting was off and interfered with the pulley. Here's a link: https://www.rx7club.com/2nd-generati...r-pump-484994/