Some people had asked me to write up my experience as a non-mechanic doing my own timing belt job a couple of weeks ago. The job went pretty smoothly and the car is running great, so I sat down to write what I did. After 5 pages in Microsoft Word and a lot more time than I thought I would spend, I have a PARTIAL write-up of my experience with the timing belt job. Let me know if this helps you or you'd like to see more. At the same time I put in all new seals in the front and installed the upgraded alternator. I'm happy to take the time to write some more or answer questions and if you have any comments/questions on what I did I'll try to answer quickly. I do have pics that I can post soon too. But for now... a MEGA-Timing Belt Write-up!!!
*** REPLACED WITH UPDATED VERSION ***
I didn't want to create a whole new post and clog the search results, so I'm replacing almost everything in this post from here down with the finished write-up. Hope someone finds it useful!
First off, I want to point out that the timing belt job is totally doable for someone like me who is a casual hobby mechanic. As you’ll see from my write-up, I ended up going a little bit further and at no time did I feel like it was overwhelming. Confusing maybe… but not overwhelming. It probably would have been a completely different story without the forum here. It’s helped me on so many issues, it’s unreal.
The best thing you’ll have going for you is preparation. I spent hours reading everything I could get my hands that was even remotely related to the work I was about to perform. Go out and look at the car… then come back in and read some more.
When it comes to getting parts, I think you should make your own list and then call up one of the Fiat suppliers. Tell them what work you’re trying to do and they’ll help put together a list for you or help you get yours correct. In my case, I knew that I wanted to replace the timing belt, try to fix any oil leaks I could, and put in an upgraded 95-AMP(!!!) alternator. Once I had my list of parts, I emailed it to Csaba at Auto-Ricambi and he helped me fill in some holes I had. I’m usually leery of naming names on this board because I’m not certain if this board has official sponsors. But Csaba has been extremely helpful and they are close to me (next day shipping for the ground price is always nice). In the end, I learned to always make sure you have a backup transportation if you need to make a trip to the autozone/o’reilly. I found out that the flagship o’reilly store in my town can get parts for the Fiat pretty darn quickly (same day in my case for the cam/aux seals).
Ok, enough preamble crap. I had wanted to do this write-up much earlier; right after doing the job. But I got really busy with work and driving the Fiat and now I have to remember to the best of my knowledge. I’ll do my best, plus I’m sure there will be people chiming in and responding with their experience/knowledge.
Overall, it took me almost three times longer to do the work than I thought it would have. I expected it to take a weekend (not working the whole time, just a couple of hours each day) and in reality I didn’t have the car running until the following weekend; just something to bear in mind.
- 1) Clean your engine! This was especially important for me, since I was leaking oil like crazy and spraying it everywhere. After looking at a bunch of pictures of others cars on this forum… it’s occurred to me that this might have been more of a blessing. With the entire engine compartment covered in at least a thin coat of oil, there was almost zero rust anywhere to be found.
Everybody has an opinion on how to clean their engine, so I’m just going to outline what I did and it worked fine for me. I took the car to the self-serve car wash and because I’m a little more crazy than most, I brought my ramps with me. This was done mainly to give me more clearance to the underside of the car. It had an absolute ton of oil on it, right around where the emergency brake lever is. So I put my ramps down in an empty stall and drove the car up on them. I had bought three cans of engine degreaser and three cans of carb cleaner. I went through at least two cans of degreaser, just spraying everything down and letting it soak in. The only areas I stayed away from (in that I didn’t spray it directly on) were the distributor and the back of the alternator.
Once you’ve let the degreaser soak in and do it’s just, it’s time to rinse. I selected High-pressure rinse and was mindful not to spray the distributor. This part was very gratifying and fun though. With the extra clearance under the car and the fact that the car leaked oil so much, I was blowing some serious deposits, dirt and gunk off the car to reveal some good looking metal underneath. After this, I took the car home and let it dry for a bit while I did some more reading.
- 2) Time to get to work… the first thing I did was to get the static timing marks lined up correctly. There are a ton of different ways to do this, but here’s my method that worked for me. I disconnected the coil wire from the distributor so the car wouldn’t start. This was because I was going to try to get them as close as possible just by “blipping” the starter. I was able to get them pretty close, but not perfect using this method. Just sighted the two holes in the cam wheels (from the driver’s side) and hit the throttle until they were almost lined up with the moldings on the Cam Housing. I had taken my timing cover (and the bracket) off a month earlier because the bracket broke. I was so glad to find out that you don’t need those pointers since there are marks for static timing that are molded into the Cam Housing. Now that I was close, I just put the car into 5th and pushed the car forward gently until I was lined up as perfectly as I could get. Just an FYI, I ended up having to follow this same procedure a couple of times for reasons I’ll explain later. But you probably won’t have the issues I did, so I pulled the emergency brake and chocked the wheels.
- 3) Disconnect your battery
- 4) This next stop I had been dreading just because it looked like such a pain… however, it turned out to be extremely easy. This was removing the radiator. Trust me, you will thank yourself for removing it… and depending on what car you have it takes less than 5 minutes.
a. Drain the radiator using the valve at the bottom driver’s side on the rear of the radiator. Catch as much as you can in a bucket since that stuff is both toxic AND sweet tasting so it can hurt your pets.
b. The radiator only has two connection points to the chassis of the car. Both within easy reach on either side of the radiator. Unscrew these nuts from the studs on the car and make sure you save all of the hardware in a ziplock bag.
c. Remove the tiny length of radiator hose that goes between the water pump and the thermostat. Just remove the one side that connects to the water pump.
d. Now, you can remove the coolant “T” on the front of the engine. Just take out the two bolts and it should come off.
e. Remove the hose that goes to the overflow bottle
f. Unhook the Radiator Fan connection (mine is electric and had a connector that I could just unsnap)
g. I found that if I followed these directions, I now had an entire assembly consisting of the radiator, all the hoses, thermostat, fan (with housing) AND the coolant “T” all together and they can be removed all at the same time and placed to the side.
- 5) Now, you’ve got lots of room to look around some more. Your timing cover should be easy to remove without the coolant T in place, so I’d take it off and get a good look at the belt. At this point, I think I took a long break to do some more research and reading to try to see if I could identify all of the parts correctly.
- 6) I wanted to keep the timing belt on and tensioned as long as possible. Since I was replacing aux/cam seals, crank seal as well as the tensioner bearing I knew that I had to take off all of the pulleys on the front of the engine. I took this opportunity to loosen them up with the belt on.
- 7) The following steps are not necessarily things you have to do, but I thought I’d write it all up anyway. I was replacing all of the front seals on the engine at the same time.
Take a 19mm socket to the three geared pulleys that are the same size. These would be for the intake cam pulley, exhaust cam pulley and the Auxiliary shaft pulley. Don’t take them completely off yet! Just loosen them. I did this so I could use the old belt to hold everything in place while I went to town with a breaker bar. Those things are on TIGHT. There was an OH S#@%T moment when the intake Gear Pulley slipped a few teeth while trying to get the bolt loosened. Visions of bent valves danced in my head for a second. It didn’t move it enough for that though. If you don’t have a belt on it, you can use a chain wrench and go one at a time.
- 9) Next step was to loosen the Crank nut. Everyone talks about how hard it is to get that thing to break free, but until you experience it… wow. I had been spraying down all of the nuts on the engine with PB Blaster for weeks (literally) and thought that would help… but the crank nut was on there. My impact wrench didn’t work, neither did my 2ft breaker bar and all my strength.
In the end, I have to admit that I cheated. I put the breaker bar and 38mm socket on the nut at a low point as close as I could get the long handle to being wedged with the garage floor. I made sure that it wasn’t going to hit the front sway bar, hooked up the battery and cranked the starter. I know others have said not to do it this way, but it worked for me. I agree it’s not ideal, but that thing was just way too tight. Using the ground as leverage and the starter as force, the nut came loose perfectly.
- 10) Line back up to Top Dead Center (TDC) and the cam static timing marks again since the starter turning has changed everything (I told you I had to do it again). I did also take the time to grab a bottle of white out and mark all of the pulleys so they showed up better.
- 11) Loosen the alternator’s slide bolt which relieves tension on the v-belt so you can take it off. After that, you can take off the crank pulley. Don’t worry, the timing belt will still be tight and in place by the little crank drive gear.
- 12) Now you are ready to loosen the belt tensioner and remove the belt. The belt tensioner is one of the goofier solutions and took me a while to figure out. Just know that the spring has NOTHING to do with keeping the belt tight while the car is running. It’s only used to provide the right tension upon install of new timing belt. As soon as the belt is tensioned correctly, you tighten everything back down and it isn’t supposed to move at all. So, in the end this little thing that looks complicated and took me forever to figure out is essentially a metal plat bolted to the block and the spring is completely useless 99.9% of the time. The whole mechanism really is just the tensioner bearing tightened onto a metal plate and bolted to the block. The early cars did not have the spring and my Haynes manual documents the “tensioning” procedure without it by exerting a specific amount of linear force on the hole in the tensioner, then tightening it down. I guess the spring was added just as a courtesy to mechanics and I’m sure it resulted in less timing belt failures due to the wrong tension being set. Another thing that surprised me about it was how little it really travels. Mine traveled AT MOST ½-inch. If you’re ready to take the belt off, you can see this by loosening the tensioner nut 17mm and the tensioner bracket bolt (which is NOT the bolt that the spring WRAPS around, but the smaller one next to it that the spring rests against. Once those are loosened you should be able to get the belt off and just to see how it worked, I took a 2x4 and used it to push on the part of the plate where the spring hooks in. You should see the whole assembly move a little bit. It helps to put a white out line so you can see it.
- 13) EDIT: I thought I’d try and add the description of the replacement of the front end seals. My car was leaking a TON of oil from these seals. They are located behind each of the pulleys you see on the front of the engine. They include the crankshaft seal, auxiliary shaft seal, and two cam seals (one intake and one exhaust). There’s a better description of the pulleys in step 15 below. Hopefully, you’ve loosened the nuts and bolts holding the four pulleys on by now. Leaving the belt on while loosening all of them makes it easier to prevent them from moving and getting too far out of alignment with each other. If you’ve got the car in gear and the wheels blocked, the crankshaft won’t move much and with the timing belt on, this will prevent the other cam/aux gears from moving while you’re loosening them as well.
- 14) You should now be in a position where you can get the belt off, if you haven’t done it already.
- 15) With the bolts/nuts loosened already, you should have no trouble taking off all of the pulleys. Taking off the pulleys will expose the seals behind them. I have to admit that at this point these seals were a complete mystery to me. It’s also at this point that if you’re not an experienced mechanic, you will take a step back… look at your engine… and think “what the hell have I done?” or “How will I get this thing back together?”. In the words of Douglas Adams, “Don’t Panic”. Make sure you know where your towel is and you’ll be fine. We haven’t even taken off the water pump yet! Fun, Fun, Fun!
- 16) So I wanted to focus on getting these seals in, but having never done any before I was a little apprehensive. There are stories on many forums of botched installs and I didn’t want to do that. Patience, research and the Internet saved the day for me here. It turns out that these seals are almost the same design in TONS if not all cars out there on the road. Realizing this, I was able to find many videos on how to replace these things. I definitely recommend you do the same search. It makes so much more sense. Essentially, they are simply pressed into the machined recess that they sit in. They fit really snugly in there… getting the first one out was the hardest until I realized that you have to pretty much destroy the old ones just to get them out of where they’re sitting. Just grab a small flat blade screwdriver and a hammer and while aiming outwards from the center use the hammer to punch the screwdriver in between the shaft and the outer lip of the seal. Just keep prying at it and working it loose. The exhaust was so tough I bent my screwdriver back enough that when it finally came out it went shooting halfway across the garage.
- 17) At this point I should mention that there are only two different seal sizes on the front of the engine. The crank has a seal that’s a little bit bigger than the aux gear and both cam gears, which share the exact same model seal.
- 18) The crank shaft seal was the hardest one to get back in… even after seeing video of it being done. I have to admit that I should have bought tools to make the job easier. It was late at this point and I was just trying to get the car done so I employed a method that might not be the best on the crank. I haven’t had any leaks yet, so knock on wood this method worked. Before trying to install the seal, coat it in engine oil. Good advice I got from someone on this board: “Coat the seal with whatever fluid it was designed to seal”. I coated them in some oil and started trying to tap the thing in. No matter how much I tapped evenly around the seal and even after sanding things down a little bit it just wasn’t going in easily and staying in. I kept trying and as soon as I could get it to stay centered in place, I grabbed the crank gear, crank pulley and the nut to act as a makeshift press to push the seal into place. It worked pretty well, but you have to stop often, take off the nut, pulley and gear and make sure the seal is still going in straight. Another thing that’s a possible issue is the rubber piece of the seal that actually rides on the crankshaft. While it’s being pressed in to the car, that rubber piece can easily get hung up on the shaft and begin to be compromise or break. Each time I pressed the seal in a little bit, I’d have to stop, take everything back apart and make sure the seal was seating correctly. I had to use a small pick to correct the seating of the inner rubber seal a couple of times. Keep in mind that you don’t want the crankshaft to turn too much while doing this. I didn’t take my spark plugs out at all for this job, but I can imagine if you have taken them out the crankshaft turns pretty easily.
- 19) Compared to the crank shaft seal, the aux shaft and cam seals are a piece of cake. If you bought the 38mm or 1.5 in socket to take the crank nut off, this seems to be the perfect size to match up with the seal and allow you to apply even pressure with a hammer or whatever to get them in fairly quickly. The inner rubber part of the seal is less prone to getting hung up as well, but you might keep it in mind while you’re pushing it in.
- 20) I am still a little baffled how the seals work and what the little spring is for. I’ll try to grab a picture and put it up so if anyone knows I’d love to hear why these seals are designed this way.
- 21) At this point, I had to remember that I splurged the $35 bucks for a new water pump. That had to go in while it was easily accessible. It’s super-easy compared to the crankshaft seal. There are just four bolts holding the pump on. There are also two bolts holding the heater tube that runs down the side of the engine under the exhaust. Loosen them all and remove the pump. I received some advice on this forum (thanks!) that I really wish I could have followed: Get some new bolts for the water pump. Mine were not in too bad a shape, so they went back on just fine. But these bolts sit in the coolant all day right next to the pumps fins. This must make them corrode a lot faster. The real worry is that they’ll break off while you’re installing the new water pump back in place. Some other advice that I took was to get a chain wrench. I held off as long as I could because I didn’t think I needed it, but in the end I did for an unrelated (to this write-up anyway) reason. It also helped me get the pulley off of the old and then onto the new water pump. The new water pump should come with gaskets for everything it connects to. I supplemented them with just a light spray of some high temp gasket material (made by 3M, comes in a can). Put it all back together and screwed the bolts back in. Be careful! They don’t have to be very tight and you might break them if you’re still using your old ones and you over-torque them.
- 22) This is just about the midway point of all of this work. You’re now solely putting things back onto the car. Believe it or not, putting everything back together went faster than taking it apart. I spent a lot of time being methodical about how the parts looked, bagging them as they were removed and researching to find out what it made sense to do next.
- 23) Putting the belt back on was actually easier than I thought, although it is a little finicky because there isn’t a lot of leeway even with the tensioner loosened. Making absolutely certain that all of the front gear pulleys are lined up correctly is the IMPORTANT step here. It’s not that tough and I’m sure you’ve read about it in other places that have a lot more detail. So, just to recap here, these directions will only work if you haven’t let the gears turn a whole bunch (a whole revolution of the crank for example): There are 4 pulleys/gears you need to worry about:
i. The Crank/Crankshaft pulley must be at top dead center. The markings for determining this were a little different from year to year, but since I had to take off the pulley anyway, I just used the end steel pin/dowel whatever you call it on the end of the crankshaft underneath the small crankshaft gear. Another way is to line up the Big Crankshaft pulley’s notch with the timing marks on the Timing Cover. Either way, you need it at TDC
ii. Moving up from the crankshaft is the aux gear pulley. I learned from this project that the aux gear pulley is exactly the same as a standard (no air pump or a/c) exhaust side cam gear pulley. They are interchangeable… I think that’s cool. Anyway, the aux gear should have a mark or a hole in it that needs to be pointed to 1 o’clock. You’ve got some leeway here, unlike with the cams which need to be as perfect as possible. Just make sure you can draw a straight line from the center of the pulley, to the hole and through the tensioner spring holder screw.
iii. The Exhaust Cam Gear needs to be lined up like it was when you took the belt off with the circle lined up with the mark on the Cam Housing and your Timing cover bracket’s pointers.
iv. Do the same in reverse with the intake cam gear; make sure it’s also lined up with its marks on the cam housing.
- 24) Now we’re ready to put the belt on. Get it around the small crank gear first; then move up the left hand side of the engine to the Aux Gear; then to the intake cam gear. This side of the belt needs to stay tight; you want all of the slack of the belt to be taken up by the tensioner on the other side. Now keep going around the Exhaust cam gear and you should be able to get the belt lined up to go around the tensioner. With a little scooching of the belt with my fingers, I was able to get the belt on. Remember, the little bit that the tensioner bracket moves is your friend here. I did this part by myself and I was able to get my belt on in a total of five minutes. I actually used the 2x4 to push in on the tensioner which made it easier. Once the belt is on, take the slack in by loosening the tensioner and letting it do it’s very simple job of moving the tensioner less than half an inch. It took me two tries before everything lined up properly in the end. The first time, the exhaust cam was off by just a bit (probably one tooth) by the time I got the belt back around the tensioner. I just took it off and tried again and it worked the second time! Now that you have the belt back on and tensioned; don’t forget to tighten the fasteners holding the pulley’s you removed!!!
- 25) Now it’s time to make sure the timing didn’t somehow get way off. I thought of skipping this step, but for peace of mind I wound up doing it. Put your huge 38mm socket on a socket wrench and put it on the crank. Proceed to turn ii clockwise taking note of how much pressure you have to exert (It’ll be way easier if you’ve removed the spark plugs). I didn’t, so I had to put more pressure to get the engine to turn. The main thing is to stop if you feel the engine start to give you more resistance. This might mean you’re timing is way off and some of the internal parts are hitting each other. Do the procedure again if you run into this, but I think that it mainly happens only to people who have taken everything completely apart. The most any of my pulleys moved was about an eighth of a turn while I was trying to loosen its bolt resulting in a skipped tooth or two that I was able to correct later. If you don’t run into any issues after two full rotations of the crank, then you’re in the clear! Time to start putting everything back in. Funny side note: While I was turning the engine by hand I heard the sound of air escaping slowly. I was able to isolate it to the number one cylinder and thankfully it was just a loose spark plug. It scared me for a bit though… glad I found it.
Wow, this got really long and has taken a lot more time than I thought it would. I have to take care of some other stuff but wanted to post what I have. I really enjoyed doing it myself a lot. It helps that I had not major issues putting everything back together. I’ve been there before and it SUCKS. Thankfully, once everything was back together, the car started right up and has run REALLY well. Plus, I have the peace of mind knowing that the belt is done and won’t break and destroy my car anytime soon. I guess I did have one issue: My belt seems to track more toward the back of the engine than I’d like. I had to put on an intake cam pulley with a lip built into the back to solve the problem. This was what originally came with the car, but I was trying to switch them both out with different ones.
As part of this project, I also upgraded to the 95-amp alternator. Wow, what an awesome upgrade! It’s totally worth the money and super easy to do. As a bonus, I now get to remove the goofy looking black box voltage regulator and its wires in the engine compartment. I didn’t want to muddy the waters by throwing that install in with this one, if anyone wants a similar write-up for it I’ll be glad to, just let me know and I’ll post it in the Electrical Forum.
Finally, while I took a lot of pride in the job I did, I welcome any other tips or tricks that people have that I missed. I’m not a mechanic, so DEFINITELY feel free if I’ve said something really dumb. While I accept no responsibility for damage incurred, I certainly want this write-up to be as correct as possible. I also have a ton of pictures I’ll try to get up soon.
Oh and the pics are NOT in order. Not sure why that happened, but you can tell because my engine gets progressively dirtier toward the end... I promise I cleaned as I went and the engine was almost spotless when I was finished, lol.
