94 Fleetwood Brougham Harmonic Balancer How-to
 

I found this forum while searching how to replace the Harmonic Balancer. Now that I've successfully done it I wanted to give back to the forum by telling what I did in case anyone else may need this info.

The rubber separating the inner and outer parts of the harmonic balancer failed while my wife was driving the car. Fortunately she was only 3 blocks from home. The outer part of the balancer skewed with one side moving toward the front. As it was wobbling it shredded the Serpentine belt, then threw it off. Fortunately this happened quickly so that nothing nearby was damaged by the flailing belt. There was no warning as I had checked under the hood the weekend previously and did not notice any wobble, etc.

I did not notice the damage to the harmonic balancer until after I replaced the serpentine belt and turned the car on. It worked OK for a moment, then started to wobble.

For this car you need a 6 rib, 64.25 inch long serpentine belt (Autozone Duralast #642K6 - $13.99). Autozone didn't have a harmonic balancer in stock so I got one at Pep Boys. (They had a Dorman #594-017, 7.5 inch dia. for $66.99.) Pep Boys didn't have a puller so I went back to Autozone and got a Great Neck #27019 harmonic balancer puller kit for $15.00. They said if I returned it when I was done I'd get a complete refund, but I think I'll keep it.

I used a 1/2 inch breaker bar with a deep socket over the mounting bolt of the idler pulley to move it clockwise to loosen the tension so I could mount (and un-mount) the serpentine belt.

I tried to use the breaker bar (with a larger size socket) to remove the three bolts that held on the harmonic balancer. That only turned the engine backwards so I used some Kroil to help loosen things up, got out my air drive impact wrench and had the bolts out in a minute. I then assembled the puller, lubed it up and installed it into the harmonic balancer and slowly worked the balancer off the shaft. (There are 3 threaded holes for the puller in the balancer.)

I then wire brushed the shaft to remove the surface rust, lubed everything back up and then slid on the harmonic balancer. You have to rotate it until all the holes line up properly. I couple of moments with the air impact wrench tightened the bolts, I re-installed the belt, started her up and saw no other problems.