My KV6 Cambelt change

[beinet1]

Hi All,

I have for a long time planned to do a cambelt change on my KV6 as they have "expired" by date 2 years ago, but has a low mileage. I have slept well at night, but decided to have this done for the piece of mind. DMGRS supplied me with a KV6 TB kit with WP for a nice price and necessary inlet manifold gaskets and sprocket bolts was purchased. I had no special tools available, so I decided to go for the "haynes way" without the special tools. I decided to park up the car in the garage for this job and use the time needed to do the job throughly without rushing anything. I also did some research up front on this forum and found a lot of useful tips before starting.

So basically, this is what I have done so far:

1. Parking the car up in my garage, put on jackstands, wheels and inner wheel arches removed. Oil and coolant drained from the engine:



2. Battery + box, air filter box and upper inlet manifold removed.

I found it hard to remove the 2 screws securing the rear of the inlet maniflod to the rear bank. I removed the bulkhead plate to gain better access. The "sad thing" is that this car has been through a cambelt earlier in its life and there is several minor issues left with that job. One of the rear bolt fixings in the upper inlet manifold was broken of and a bolt was missing in the other end. They have also managed to use tooling to remove the upper inlet manifold and make indents in the inlet manifold flange seal surface.



3. I decided to do the rear belts first before removing the RH engine mount, based on some advice found in an earlier thread. The covers was removed, finding another issue where one of the bolts where over-tightened and making a thread insert int the inner cambelt cover to came loose.
The engine was turned to the "safe position" as described in the haynes manual and the position of the rear sprockets was marked up for re-alignment later on.

A simple sprocket holding tool was fabricated from some steel bars, making me able to hold the sprockets stationary while loosen and tighten the sprocket bolts without placing any strain on the cambelts and camshafts.

The rear sprocket bolt in the inlet camshaft was loosened and the sprocket was gently removed from the camshaft. The exhaust sprocket moved sligthly when this was done.
A new cambelt was put in place and the inlet camshaft sprocket was put back on with a new sprocket bolt. I turned the exhaust camshaft back in the correct position according to my marks with a socket tool on its sprocket bolt while putting the inlet camshaft sprocket back on with its new bolt, tightened with my fingers only. Checking that the alignment was 100%, then torqued and angle tightened (27Nm+90deg) the sprocket bolt using the sprocket holding tool:

Then I did the same procedure for the other rear cambelt and ended up having two freshly installed rear cambelts:


I turned the engine two full revolutions and parked it up in the safe position, tripple checking the alignements to make sure everything was perfect.
So far, so good. 4 hours used. I will now proceed with the front end in the next days.

The old belts looked to be in a fantastic condition (!). Seems like they lasts a lot longer than their "due date"