Back in June my buddy Lance and his janke hooptie and my family in our Suburban decided on an nice day trip up to Crown King via dirt. It is a nice, relatively easy trail and offers some very nice scenery. It all went well for a while until the mechanical mayhem began. My truck started running a bit warm which is something it never does. After that, Lances truck was running so lean that it was making no power and running warm itself then the battery launched itself out of the tray and ended up laying upside down on the motor melting the negative cable apart.
While we were stopped for something I noticed my truck had an odd sound coming from the engine compartment. It was a kind of ringing sound. Well, after some amount of time I determined it to be my Horton electromagnetic fan drive. Something was wrong with it and it was engaging and disengaging rapidly. I finally pulled the electrical connector to turn it off completely. This created a couple problems. One was the A/C had to stay off. No biggie for me and the boy, but I like to run it to keep my wife comfortable on the hot, dusty trails. The other problem is the electric fans will not keep the motor cool on a hot day like it was while pulling hills. This trail is almost completely uphill from south to north--the way we were running it. We were able to keep going and occasionally stopping to plug the fan clutch back in to cool the motor down while sitting still. For some odd reason it would still function sitting still. We'd cool the motor down, then climb the hill some more. We finally made it to Crown King and had a late lunch at the bar in town there. We went out the easy way and the electric fans were enough to keep it cool without stopping (even with the A/C on). We made it home later than anticipated, but intact, with nothing blown up.
So, what happened?? After much investigation, I found that where the wires enter the coil housing they had some damaged insulation from getting into the fan a few years back. I had repaired the wires, but I didn't realize at the time the wires had been damaged at that place. The wire/s were broken and *just* making contact (occasionally--thus the ringing sound).
I started researching repair options and I quickly found there are exactly NONE. Nobody fixes these things. I had read that Horton will service them so I called them and got a very nice, helpful lady on the phone who explained that they do nothing to fix them. Horton will fix or sell rebuild kits for their pneumatic fan drives all day long, but not these. They will sell a new one, but this one has been discontinued for many years (long before I bought my NOS unit). There was really nothing she could do to help. I found a place that had an old Horton fan drive that I could check out and buy the piece I need, but the wires were damaged just like mine, so that was no good. I found a manufacturer's sticker and part number on my clutch and called a motion industries establishment with the information. He went so far as to contact the manufacturer but found that it is completely proprietary and only sold to Horton. Uuuugh!! I finally found a brand new clutch assembly on the ebays and got it for a very reasonable price. It was not the same as what I had, but I was rolling the dice that I could make the coil work with my clutch. It turned out that I could. I pulled the coil off the old one and installed the coil from the new one:
So while all of this was going on (several weeks), we had other trails to run so I picked up a stock fan clutch from Dodge to hold me over until I found all the aforementioned parts. I had picked up an aftermarket Hayden fan clutch, but I really hate aftermarket viscous fan drives. The clutch on the left is the OEM Dodge unit and the one one the right is the aftermarket Hayden unit. The differences are quite apparent:
It worked good, but reminded me how much I love the Horton. The Horton is on or it is off, no in-between. The stock unit is always on. Maybe just partially, but never completely free-spinning like the Horton. It makes more noise than the Horton and doesn't cool any better. I was ecstatic when I got my repaired Horton back on the motor.