wat exactly does a harmonic or whatever damper do?

whyy are they so expensive?

 

A harmonic balancer is like a torsional spring that conteracts the torsional vibration of the crankshaft. As the torque on the crank increases in either direction, the resulting twisting causes imbalance. The balancer absorbs the energy and delivers it back to the crank out of phase with the energy that was delivered to the balancer. The two cancel each other and quiet down the crank. I'm no expert on balancers but that's my take on how they work.

 

sounds like you got a pretty good understanding of it 302forever, at least from what I have read on them. to put the price into perspective.... most harmonic balancers are SFI approved. you can get some that are not approved for a fairly cheap price. but the SFI approval is the key. to get SFI approval isn't easy. basically, the product gets spun at a certain specified rpm and gets struck with a certain amount of force to see if it comes apart. hence the reason that going fast is not cheap.

 

It's wierd how things that don't look like they would do anything can be so important. The person who first thought of those things must have been doin some heavy thinkin.