Got Real Lucky! Timing Belt story
Posted: February 25th, 2004, 6:21 pm
I had an incident last night that is a story worth telling. I was on my way home and took a left turn onto an entrance ramp to the interstate. The car stumbled and when I went to second gear had zero power. Went back to first and the car was ok for a second then died. "Hrm, that's odd” I thought. I tried to start the car with no luck. It tried to start but would not turn over. I thought maybe I should not try to start it anymore incase it's the timing belt but at this point 2 other people had tried to start it so I also figured it the timing belt was the issue the damage was done.
I called a friend of mine who works at a local shop here (FASTECH) and he grabbed their race trailer and a tow vehicle and we pushed the car up on the trailer and took it back to the shop. We rolled it in the shop and decide to pull the valve cover and see what we see. Everything looked fine although my cam gears looked funny. He said try and crank it once real quick. As I did this the timing belt flopped around and was loose enough to stick a finger between it and the cam gear. Billy yells "STOP!" and I look to see the loose belt. Well there’s the answer to what happened. It's about 8:30 by now and he says, "Want to fix it tonight?" Off we go . . .
We put it on the lift and pulled everything off the car (Timing belt covers, Power steering, AC/Alternator Belts). What we found was that everything was in perfect working order except the timing belt tensioner has slipped to the loosest setting. This was strange since the bolt on the tensioner was pretty tight. We then began to set the cams and crank back to TDC and see what damage had been done. We got it all set back and tightened up and did a leak down test and compression test.
First the leak down test. Billy had a nice leak down gauge and once we figured out the compressor was providing too much air pressure we got repeatable results and we started testing for valve seat leakage. RESULTS: Cylinder 1 was first, low leakage . . . . Cylinder 4, Low Leakage, . . . Cylinder 2, Low Leakage . . . Cylinder 3, Low Leakage . . . Holy cow!!!!! I looked at him and said, NOT POSSIBLE and he just called me the luckiest man in the world. Being skeptical and not satisfied I insisted we do a compression test. Here are the results (psi): 240, 240, 240, 239.
When it happened I was feeling pretty unlucky while contemplating which cams and valvetrain I was going to order in the morning. By 10:30 pm I was feeling like the luckiest person in the world. I know people who had a belt skip a tooth and tore up the whole head. I have the belt off 15+ teeth and who know how many times it's turned over with them slipping and no damage what-so-ever to speak of.
I should have bought a lottery ticket yesterday!
I called a friend of mine who works at a local shop here (FASTECH) and he grabbed their race trailer and a tow vehicle and we pushed the car up on the trailer and took it back to the shop. We rolled it in the shop and decide to pull the valve cover and see what we see. Everything looked fine although my cam gears looked funny. He said try and crank it once real quick. As I did this the timing belt flopped around and was loose enough to stick a finger between it and the cam gear. Billy yells "STOP!" and I look to see the loose belt. Well there’s the answer to what happened. It's about 8:30 by now and he says, "Want to fix it tonight?" Off we go . . .
We put it on the lift and pulled everything off the car (Timing belt covers, Power steering, AC/Alternator Belts). What we found was that everything was in perfect working order except the timing belt tensioner has slipped to the loosest setting. This was strange since the bolt on the tensioner was pretty tight. We then began to set the cams and crank back to TDC and see what damage had been done. We got it all set back and tightened up and did a leak down test and compression test.
First the leak down test. Billy had a nice leak down gauge and once we figured out the compressor was providing too much air pressure we got repeatable results and we started testing for valve seat leakage. RESULTS: Cylinder 1 was first, low leakage . . . . Cylinder 4, Low Leakage, . . . Cylinder 2, Low Leakage . . . Cylinder 3, Low Leakage . . . Holy cow!!!!! I looked at him and said, NOT POSSIBLE and he just called me the luckiest man in the world. Being skeptical and not satisfied I insisted we do a compression test. Here are the results (psi): 240, 240, 240, 239.
When it happened I was feeling pretty unlucky while contemplating which cams and valvetrain I was going to order in the morning. By 10:30 pm I was feeling like the luckiest person in the world. I know people who had a belt skip a tooth and tore up the whole head. I have the belt off 15+ teeth and who know how many times it's turned over with them slipping and no damage what-so-ever to speak of.
I should have bought a lottery ticket yesterday!
