Pulled my cam belt covers off on the weekend for a lookeesee and saw this: The idler and tensioner bearings are clean with no blue stuff on them. Everything is covered in a very fine blue dust. The blue stuff on the upper idler is stuck on good and proper, it has to be scrapped off to move it. The belt is a little tighter than I would prefer, that is all I can think that would do it. Idlers and tensioner are from CZP, and Nissan OEM from what I can recall. Cams are Ivan Tighe, springs are Performance Valvesprings and sprockets are all JUN. Anyone seen this before?
thats interesting check that your idler pulley bearings aren't seized or tight to spin. I just put a greddy belt on my engine instead of the gates . what gap is in your tensioner? ...I just set mine to a tight 2mm
Mine was set to about 4mm. I can't check without removing the lower cover, and I won't be able to check that for a while. Zed will be off the road soon, needs a respray so I'll also remove the engine as it has some annoying oil leaks. Possible, don't want to bend anything
I would forward those pics to the gates rep near you and have them cast an opinion. As apart from the obvious such as too tight of a tensioner setting. It looks like either heat has affected the outer coating of the belt and when stationary it's laminated the coating to the upper idler. Then once in movement again it's been chipping away at the belt coating even more. Hence the blue dust. Bad combination of things really. Also those Allen head bolts on the gears are of poor quality. They're rusting!? Were they supplied with the gears or were they out of the bolt draw at work? Either way not very good. Obviously not a real concern at the moment but for the money spent on them you'd thing they'd be better.
Pretty standard from what I have seen with the Gates blue belts. There are after market idlers available from various manufacturers that have plastic wheels on them, these don't seem to have the same issue with the blue coating.
Apart from maybe being soft to touch with the belt, these plastic idlers. What has been the consensus as to why it's laminating to the metal pulley? Just too tight or heat affect. Or another factor?
The bolts on the sprockets are the ones that came from JUN!! I'm pretty disappointed with the anodising and bolts that came with them
I've not bothered to try and figure it out & frankly am not edumikated in the properties of fancy plastics enough to know what is going on :rofl: At a guess I'd say it's to do with heat and general stickiness of the surface, similar to the way paint might stick to bare clean shiny steel but not some plastics with similar surface finish.
Crispy. Good excuse for some shiney stainless aye. Mungyz, fair enough. You'd hope that if it was heat affect it isn't taking any of the anti wear products off the belt. Leaving it prone to premature wear. Anyways chrispys the fancy engineer now. Sure enough he'll eduamikadte us on the topic.
That puts me off buying a Gates racing belt. Was considering getting one of those, but by those pics thats out now. Thanks for the heads up.
My black Gates timing belt did/does the same thing, Chris. Just stick your finger in there while the engine is running, cleans it all off nicely.
This is a bit concerning... I just installed a power enterprise kevlar belt with my 100K km service a few months back. I guess I'll be pulling my covers to check if mine's doing the same thing They're not exactly cheap, so if the blue's worn off I'll be a bit disappointed. It doesn't look like it's weakened the belt though, which is good I guess.
SS fasteners won't rust but they are a long way from being as strong as black HT which of course will rust. But usually not enough to cause any security problems so I know which I would rather have.
Crispy, ive flicked this off to Gates engineering - see if they can shed some light on it for you. I am inclined to think its the idler or something is fowling the belt.
Yes, that is the risk of stainless. I'll hit up my bolt man and see what he can do for me. Excellent thanks Ben! After a bit of thinking I reckon it's probably the idler. If I get a chance I'll pull it all down tomorrow.
Yeah mine does the same thing, nothing to worry about. It's just paint, nothing that affects the integrity of the belt. These belts are ****ing strong too, I've seen first hand what happens when a foreign object gets between the timing gears and the timing belt... the belt came back badly scored but no fraying/tearing/breaking of any kind.
Like rob260 Chrispy, mine has done the same thing when I removed the covers for another job. Nothing to be concerned about.