Well yesterday I was bombing around in my Camaro with a few 5000 rpm runs. Car ran fine and when I parked it I didn't notice anything strange. This morning I hop in the car and drive to work (no hot rodding around) and shortly before work I here a knocking type sound and a vibration through the shifter.

I get off work and start the car. I drive it out to my dads place to check out the problem. On the drive I don't seem to have any issues besides the noise itself. The noise varies with rpm also.

So at my dads we are using a stethoscope to listen for the noise and it was kind of hard to put our finger on where it was coming from. During this my father notices that the main pulley on the crank is wobbly. When I reach down there the main bolt for the balancer is lose. After looking at the dampener it also seemed to be wobbly while running. When I put the balancer on originally we had a lot of problems getting it on properly. We were able to do a half *** rethread on the bolt and tightened it up snug (my opinion should have been more snug)

After that the noise was gone. We decided that over the weekend we should pull it apart to do a proper repair on it. Driving back to home about 20 mins it seemed fine with no noise for about 15 mins then close to home the noise came back.

My question is will a bad dampener cause what to the untrained ear sounded like a rod? Was the dampener just a different problem?

 

Yes, a loose damper can cause noise. And, it can cause internal damage to the engine.