Add me to the "DIY belt change" club - finished my this week. Like Scott, it took me the course of about a week and a half, chipping awya at it bit by bit, to complete the job. In addition to the belts and rollers, I replaced the front balance shaft seals, water pump, thermostat, timing belt tensioner, and I even replaced the tensioner pivot pin. To you guys who say you can do this job in 2-3 hours, all I can say is, "I am not worthy... I am not worthy...!" 2-3 hours!!!??? Just making sure I'm at TDC, jacking up the car, removing the starter, and installing the flywheel lock takes me a good 20 minutes. Sheesh, I couldn't turn all the nuts and bolts needed for this job in 2-3 hours of they were all threaded through a piece of plywood lain flat across a pair of sawhorses. But I digress a little...
Overall, in hindsight, the job isn't too bad, and if I had to do it over, I could probably do in a third the 12+ hours it took me, now that I know what I'm doing. My observations:
The TDC thing: My distributor has a window on top, through which I can see the TDC marks. There's nothing on my car, however, visible either through the tiny window on top of the bell housing, or on the flywheel through the starter opening. So I spent (wasted) quite a bit of time stressing over whether I was really at TDC. I think the easiest way to tell is to simply line up the marks between the cam gear and the housing, and noting the position of the rotor. It should look like figure 792-15 on page 15-4 in the manual. If I had seen that figure before I started, I would have taken care of TDC in about a minute.
Special tools: The only thing I needed to buy was the flywheel lock. My neighbor has a pair of pliers bent at 90 degrees, which did the job of holding the balance shaft sprockets while I was lossening/tightening their bolts. No need for the $50+ pin wrench. I would, however, recommend shelling out the $27 or so for the 27 mm flat wrench available at Paragon and other places. This would have made the setting of the balance shaft tension more convenient.
Balance shaft seals: Mine weren't too hard to get out, though for some reason the top one was tighter than the bottom. I ended up drilling through the top one, threading a drywall screw, and yanking it out with a pair of large pliers. The bottom one came out with a good yank using a pick. Very important, though: I found out the hard way that the OD of the upper balance shaft seal is 47 mm, and the bottom one is 48 mm. The diameters are stamped into the seals. I didn't notice this, and ruined a seal trying to force a 48 mm seal into the upper shaft housing. Doh!
Water pump: Let the slings and arrows fly, but I refuse to spend two track days worth of money on a new water pump, given that the thing has, oh, like ONE moving part. I bought a remanufactured one from Paragon for just over a hundred bucks. No leaks so far, but I'll keep everybody updated if it springs one. But I did notice something. The original pump has a pair of guide pins that look like roll pins inserted into two of the bolt holes. I tapped these out of my old pump, and (very carefully, making sure I had the pump securely supported on the bottom), tapped them into the same bolt holes of the new (remanufactured) pump. I wonder if this isn't part of the reason several people have had bad experiences with remanufactured pumps. These guide pins are there for a reason, so maybe without them, the pump will "wander" a bit, eventually springing a leak.
Balance shaft belt tensioning: I wish I had found the thread which included two methods for tensioning the belt (the 90 degree twist method, and the RS Barn place-finger-at-4-oclock-on-water-pump-idler-pulley-and-deflect-the-belt-to-this-point method) before I had tensioned my belt, so my neighbor and I ended up doing it by feel. But I think we pretty much nailed it, because the belts whine just a bit for the first 15 seconds or so after start-up, and then quiets down. The last time I did my balance shaft belt, I must have set it too tight, because it took a lot longer for the whine to go away.
I did run into one problem. One of the threads for the water pump bolts stripped as I was installing the pump. I replaced the bolt with one about 1/4" longer, and this holds a little tighter, but I can't achieve the specified 10 nm. I'm at about 7 nm. But so far, there's no sign of a leak around this bolt, which thankfully is the topmost bolt on the pump, and is therfore very accessible. I will continue to watch it very closely, and imagine that at some point, I will have to re-tap this thread. I'll be asking for advice when it comes time to do this, because, oddly, in all my years of working on cars, I've never stripped a thread before, or broken off a bolt. So I'm a little nervous about doing my first tap job on a nearly priceless aluminum engine block. What do you guys think? Do you think it's safe to leave this for now, since it isn't leaking, and fix it at the first sign of trouble? Please nobody tell me I need to remove the water pump to repair this thread, not only because of the time involved, but I'm concerned that if this thread stripped, who knows how many of the others are just a turn away from stripping as well.
Anyway, thanks to everyone, especially Scott, for all the advice they gave me throughout this job. I hope my experience helps somebody else.
