Quote:
Originally Posted by Tommy Two Stroke
Good point about doing what we can to keep these engines out of the junkyards by giving them proper care and maintenance. It's indeed a sad sight seeing a diesel Volvo in a junkyard.
Re: timing setting procedures, I've actually had quite good results with simply transferring the timing marks from the old belt to the new belt, prior to installing the new belt. I have the injection pump depth gauge, and each time I've done the job by transferring the timing marks and installing the new belt, I check the injection timing and it has not been off by much at all. As with anything, I think there are limits and extremes. If the engine is mechanically sound and running well prior to the timing belt change, and you put hte everything back EXACTLY the way you found it, the engines generally run quite well with performance similar or identical to that which the engine had prior to the timing belt changed. I've owned D24's and D24T's for 17 years now, and am fortunate enough to have quite a bit of time under my belt working on them.
|
I agree. If your engine is set up right and running well to begin with, AND you know what the proper procedures are, and you *choose* not to use them and do the job with belt marks instead, but you still go back and check everything afterwards and verify that your work's results met the necessary specs, then that's a fine method. However, that's completely different from believing that all you have to do is mark the belt and slap it on without checking anything, like you would on an old redblock gasser Volvo. When it gets to be a bad idea is when you either don't know what the correct precedure is at all and are ignorant of the risks of doing it wrong, or when you may be aware of the right way to do it, but are unwilling to go to the effort, or are unwilling to correct things if you find out after you do it that the timing ended up coming out a bit... etc.
For me, the easiest thing to do is to just do the job completely every time. Since you are installing the dial indicator to check timing anyway, and getting to TDC, etc, I don't think it takes much longer to break the cam sprockets free and pull the valve cover off than it does to mess with marking the belt and sprockets, transferring marks, checking that they all line up, etc... and if after all that, you discover that due to a slight difference in belt length, manufacturing variation, different tension, etc your timing didn't end up just right, you are going to have to go back and re-do it all the correct way anyway, and that ends up taking quite a bit more time than if you had done the complete procedure in the first place. If you get lucky and get a new belt that is just like the old one, then your method may save you some time, but I would think the odds would be good you'd have to redo it most of the time. But maybe not. I've never tried it that way so I have no data. Who knows.
Either way, it sounds like you know what the critical points are, so as long as the same end result is achieved, it doesn't matter how you got there. The rest is a matter of preference.
