Do I need to replace fan pulley bracket?
New 6.7L 2007 2500 Cummins owner.
Bought the truck a week ago, keep finding out the stuff I missed during my due diligence. Good thing no big items so far and I made home pulling behind my trusty diesel wagon that got me there in 5 hrs. No overheating, no oil pressure issues, knock on wood.
I discovered that the cooling fan stays on all the time, also when the engine is turned off it stops pretty rough, shaking the whole cabin.
So under the engine bay, when I was looking at steering components, I noticed the fan clutch wires are disconnected and chewed up at their ends. Spent some time looking for the other end of the connection and only today after viewing some fan clutch installation videos on youtube found the connector. Traced along it and fished the whole other end, mounted onto some bracket that was broken. I guess what happened, the wire got sucked into the fan, the fan tore the whole thing off the bracket. The base of the bracket is still bolted to the lower shroud frame. The lower shroud is missing as well. One of the fan blades is chipped at the end.
When the fan is spinning, the fan clutch pigtail remnants are spinning as well, so nothins is trapping. But what I noticed, the rotating fan does not have one solid outline, rather a blurry one, suggesting that it's not concentric with the axis of the motor rotation. The pulleys look not blurry, so it's only running fan is uneven/warped. That and the chipped blade probably are good enough reasons to cause some vibration, what do you think?
So, my main question is about fan pulley bracket. Is it possible that when the accident happened and the clutch wires got trapped and torn, it would put enough stress on the bracket to bend it slightly and cause the fan to spin unevenly afterwards? I am buying the fan, the clutch and the lower shroud. Should I also replace that bracket?