So what I thought was my water pump making noise, I checked it again and noticed way too much slack in the timing belt. I went ahead and tore down the timing belt side to get to the water pump and to check to see if my tensioner pulley had loosened and rolled back. I get the timing belt cover off and see that the tensioner is entirely collapsed. I fire the engine up and sure enough, the noise that I thought was my water pump was actually the tensioner pulley slapping the collapsed hydraulic tensioner. It even almost sounded like rod knock. I shut the engine off and pulled the hydraulic tensioner off. I got a good laugh when I could push the pin all the way in with just the force exerted by my thumb.
This has been the 4th hydraulic tensioner to fail on me, and this one only had 7,000 or so miles on it. I am tired of risking my valves on these fucking tensioners. I know for A fact that i am doing nothing wrong when installing them and setting the timing. Maybe some of you guys might have an idea as to why these things keep failing. I have come to the conclusion that I am going to be using a solid tensioner. If anything, this will only be better because I know for a fact that it cannot fail, and the only thing I need to be concerned about is adjusting for slack from age and temperature changes over time. I talked to one fella that had a BLE for his DD DSM and he said he hasn't even had to adjust it once for the almost 2 years he has had it on his car. He estimates that there is probably around 24,000 miles on it by now.
/rant
UPDATE:
Drilled a 5/16 hole in the bottom. Tapped it to 5/16x18
The rest is history. $3.03
There was a little bit of secondary modifications to fit the tensioner back to the block. There was a little bit of aluminum in the way from the oil filter housing. I took my die grinder and fixed that problem. Then I noticed the main timing belt cover was pressed up against the bolt of the tensioner. So, once again, I just took my die grinder to the cover and that was that. Just got back from driving it around for two hours, the belt has a little faint whine to it now, but only when under the hood revving it. There is no additional slack in the belt at all and everything worked WAY better than expected!!!! I must say, I am extremely pleased with my handy work today, and I urge anyone wanting a solid tensioner to try making one the way I did before spending $100+
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