Hi John,
My name is Daniel Seeman from URO Parts and I'd love to get some additional information about your difficulties so we can find out what is going on. Our Quality Control team inspected the part you purchased against a Genuine Mercedes fan bearing bracket and here's what we found.
#1 the aluminum feels very cheap
The die cast material used to fabricate is ADC12 a very common material used for automotive parts, similar to A383 material. I also weighed the Genuine part and ours and they both weigh exactly 1.8 lbs.
#2 the hole for the tapered 13mm Y-bracket/oil bolt is too small. This caused me to knocked the small o ring out of place and I ended up dropping it into my timing case. luckily I could fish it out with a wire hanger.
I ended up having to take my drill out and widening the hole to fit the tapered bolt body.
All the tapped holes match the Genuine sample *(M6-1.0, M8-1.25,M10-1.5). However, we did find that one of the screw through holes is off by 0.8mm, which we are fixing as we speak. Please see image below.
#3 the hub for the pulley was too large. being out of spec, it was almost impossible to fit the clutch fan pulley. I had to do find extra bolts that were longer and used them to bring the pulley in.
Our hub measures exactly as the Genuine, M35.02dia. (1.378”)
#4 the hole for threading the upper smog pump bolt is not even close to alignment. when looking at it straight on, you can definitely see the misalignment which will require me to do more drilling to accomdate the smog pump.
The through holes chord distance positions are within 0.25mm which probably is accounted for by the smaller hole diameter.
Not sure what he is referring to. Need additional information.
Thanks to your post we did find one hole that was off by 0.8mm, but couldn't verify the other issues you mentioned. We'd love to get item back that you received to do further analysis and make sure it is ours. Please email or PM if you'd like to get a replacement.
Best regards,
Daniel Seeman
daniel@apaindustries.com