Timing Belt Repair

On Wednesday this week, Greg and I worked on the the car a little more and got the new timing belt installed. The old belt is in atrocious condition, being very cracked, and clearly stretched. The new belt went on much tighter, and looks so new and clean.

Since this is a budget build, we bought an eBay timing belt that was a bargain but turned up one minor issue. There are three marks on the belt. One is supposed to be marked CL for the center (crankshaft) pulley, but it wasn't. That was pretty easy to figure out, but the bigger problem was that the marks for the camshaft pulleys was slightly off. There is a mark on a tooth on the pulley, and a mark that lined up with a tooth on the belt. If you think about that the belt mark would either end up on one side or the other of the pulley tooth. Crap. There was a paint mark on the pulley, and we decided to align the belt with that. Hopefully it's aligned properly and the car will run well, but if it's running poorly, we'll have to open this back up.

We put the engine back together right up until the point where we needed to install the fan hydraulic pump and it's idler pulley. Since we're removing the hydraulic fan system, we need to remove the pump, but at the same time, we need to keep the idler. So, we need to modify this part. Probably with a grinder. We'll save that as a side project for the next major build day.