Torsional Vibration Dampener Failure on Victor 1+ The Victor 1+ torsional vibration dampener separated from its hub located on the starter disk with just a little over 98 hours on the engine. After starting the engine I heard a rubbing noise and a rattle. I shut the engine down and found that I could not turn the propeller. I thought that may be a ball had broken in one of the bearings on the belt end of the engine. Upon disassembling the engine I found no damage to the cylinder and piston or to the wrist pin and crank bearings. Next I removed the flywheel housing cover, and I found the elastomer used between the dampener ring and the starter gear hub had failed. The ring fell off the hub and down were it acted as a disk brake between the starter ring web and the flywheel cover. Fortunately the engine was running at an idle. Very little energy was dissipated so only cosmetic damage was done to the flywheel end of the engine. This is a view looking at the inside of the flywheel cover. When mounted on the engine, the bolt hole on the bottom and the one to the left would fall on a horizontal line. One can see where the steel dampener ring scraped the aluminum housing. Another view of the surface rubbed by the steel dampener ring. The black particles came from the elastomer ring material that originally held the ring in place. This view is of the hub on which the dampener ring had been mounted. The little aluminum belt pulley drives the engine coolant pump. This is the ring. The engine vendor informed me that Simonini does not use these rings on new engines, and the engine should run fine without it. That was good news. An added benefit is that the ring weighs 1.5 pounds, and so, the FireFly will be lighter than before.