Accident due to failure of the damper (Solved)

One of the things we hate when we are on the road is to get stuck in an accident anywhere and without the possibility of repairing the failure at the moment. So after that we have to arrange for a tow truck to take us home or to the garage, or if luck is on your side, we can count on a good friend who can tow us to wherever we need to go. The latter is what happened when my Jeep Wagoneer Limited's truck decided it was time to fail, leaving me unable to drive.

We were coming out from cleaning the underneath of the truck with a hydrojet since we had gone to the beach a couple of days ago, but then, sooner rather than later something quite noisy started to sound in the engine, in my inexperience I could tell that it was something related to the belt as it sounded like a rubber being forced. We opened the hood and at first glance we could not detect any irregularities, but when we looked at the damper we saw some rubber that seemed to have been torn to pieces.

To avoid further damage, I was towed home where I would try to validate in more detail the extent of the damage and possible solutions. We removed the electric fan, the radiator and a couple of other elements in order to have access to the damper. After lowering it, we could see a clear wear as a result of time, frankly I do not know if this part was ever changed, but if not it had about 30 years of uninterrupted operation.

As you can see in the following photos, the damper had a clear wear in a rubber that separates and keeps synchronized the two metal rings that make up the pulley, in fact, it was falling apart. This failure caused the belt to become misaligned and thus generated the annoying and alarming noise.

I don't know if this is the ideal solution, but at times when the situation presses him, I ask my mechanic to resort to his great creativity to solve problems like these. So, practicing his experience with a similar failure, he decided to drill at three equally distant points and then screw in three bolts at a specific location. This would keep the two metal elements that make up the pulley synchronized and fixed so that it would be operational again.

I can tell you that from that moment on everything went back to normal, the noise disappeared and the damper is still doing its important job. There are times when replacing a part is not an option either for time or economic reasons, but it is there where the ingenuity of our mechanic plays a key role to solve problems like these that can clearly leave you crashed. Having a car from three decades ago means that things like this can happen sporadically, however I still think this is a very good quality car that once you replace a part you will hardly ever ask for it again.