Over the last couple of weeks our 1.8NA has been getting noisier from the front of the engine.
In the fear of iminent failure as I thought the water pump bearings were shot, its in the garage for a cambelt and pump…
Anyway, when I removed the cam cover the belt was very slack between the camshaft pulleys.
With the crankshaft at no1 TDC, should the pulley locating dowels in the camshafts be bang on 12 o’clock??
From the timing marks on the pulleys and the plate, it looks at the cam timing was about a tooth out on each cam.
The inlet cam dowel sits at about 11.30, and the exhaust cam sits at about 12.30, looking at the marks they should sit at 12.00 on the nose…
Also, under the pas pump, there seems to be an elbow bolted to the water pump, that feeds the rad hose and a hard line to the rear of the engine.
Does this need to come off the pump beforehand, as the bolts are FT, or does it come off with the pump and the hard line pull spart with a seal??
Just thought I’d ask instead of buggering something up…
Cheers in advance guys…
Can’t answer your question, but I recall years ago, and old hand from the Dagenham Ford Works asking if by FT I meant Finger Tight…
The camshat alignment marks should both line up with the marks shown in any “how to” article on MX5 cambelt replacement that are available on this and other websites.
Yes the waterpump has to be unbolted from that pipe junction before removal of the waterpump.
Thanks guys,
My only reason for asking is that the marks wern’t overly clear on the plate, and not timed quite right when the belt was last changed. Since having it all off and cleaning it all the marks are more prominent now.
If it does ever crop up in the future, the locating bumps on the camshaft ends do sit at 12 o’clock.
Anyway pump all done now, and FT in this case meant freaking tight…![]()
I had a couple of the cover bolts all seized on the bottom cover, the bolts, cover sleeve and the engine had kinda fused together into a brown lump.
Luckily the heads sheared off, and after removing the cover I could bit by bit peel the sleeve off the bolt remains, leaving what looks like an M6 stud coming out of the engine block. I ran a die down it to clean the thread up.
I then made two new fixings from a couple of M8 x 16 button head bolts, by drilling down the center and tapping out to M6. These now screw onto the studs left from the broken bolts.
The M8 outer diamter fits the cover where the sleeve used to be. I prefered that to getting in there with the torch and heating it up and trying to get the bolts out, or drilling them out and driling into the unknown…
Cheers guys