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Possible Timing Belt issues

AliasJerk

Addicted CEG'er
Joined
Oct 13, 2003
Messages
8,525
As many of you know I have a 1999 SE Contour 2.0L with a 5 speed. That my friend and I brought back from the dead.

It turned out the timing belt had broken, so Bill and I spent a couple of weekends tearing it apart and replacing the belt with the Gates timing belt kit. All went well, and upon the first turn of the engine it started up perfectly, and ran beautifully. I purchased the car from Bill and have put on about 2000 miles since, we left the timing belt cover off so that I could inspect it from time to time to make sure there were no issues with our install, aside from a very minor amount of fraying for the first 1000 miles, everything evened out and looked great.

So today, I ran some errands and got back and decided to check all of my fluid levels, since I only drive the car once every 3 or 4 days, I wanted to make sure everything was going fine.

I poped the hood too see two small chips in the belt, the slivers of rubber were about the size of a finger nail clipping, upon pulling off the slivers I saw some exposed fibers from the inside of the timing belt.

This concerns me a lot, I started up the car again and inspected the belts operation it seems to be working fine, but I looked down at the tensioner (since I can see it) and it seems to bounce back and forth a little bit, shouldn't the tensioner not move at all?
 
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