People...PLEASE beware when installing the Mopar Performance DBL-Roller
Timing Chain!!
After everything was put back together earlier tonight, she was ready to
fire up again. She cranked (rather strangley) a few time but fired
up...VERY rough idle and the engine sounded like a diesel engine. We
immediately shut her down and tore down the timing cover...just to check if
the timing marks weren't quite "dead-on". Yup, they're right on.
Hmmm...maybe they're off from the factory...
We reinstalled the original factory set and found that it was off by three
teeth!! After a closer inspection of the crank gear (Mopar Perf), we found
that the normal "Ball Peen" mark was off and there was a VERY SMALL scratch
on the gear designating the alignment mark. We compared the factory and the
MP gear together and found that the scratch mark was actually the alignment
mark. Yes, it was mismarked from the factory!! (I'm an ex-mechanic and
have installed many timing gear sets without ever seeing anything like
this...and my neighbor who's an ex-GM Line mechanic checked everything with
me on install and agreed that this was mismarked as well.)
Please, be very careful when you install the new gears (if you decide to do
this yourself)...compare the old gear with the new one and don't just
"trust" MP to be accurate from the package.
We're checking the compression in all cylinders tomorrow to make sure that
nothing was damaged.
- Bernd
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jun 20 2003 - 11:56:16 EDT