[alfa] Re: V6 tensioner

[Joe Elliott <jee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

They can start to ooze oil again fairly quickly, but I don't think it 
has much to do with a damaged shaft.  I'd take some measurements and 
verify that, but I'm at school and my micrometer and box of V6 
tensioners are at home.

In my not-so-humble opinion, the solution is to put new o-rings on 
the oil feed stud and the backing plate, tap threads (4 x .7mm) in 
the end of the stud, and plug it (you could just as easily fill it 
with JB Weld or solder, but I like the idea of being able to revert 
to stock in 2031 so I don't lose any concours points for a modified 
tensioner).  You should probably also drill a hole in the piston, but 
you could make it threaded 4 x .7mm so when you need to revert to 
100% stock, you can take your plug out of the stud and put it in the 
piston.  I didn't bother drilling a hole in my piston, and I don't 
worry about it, though.  What you're left with is a purely 
spring-based tensioner, which is pretty much ideal.  I understand why 
Alfa did it the way they did it, but it was really overkill, and 
perhaps more importantly, had some drawbacks.  Eliminating the oil 
feed gives you pretty much constant tension all the time, and it 
actually responds to thermal expansion directly (which it did all 
along--the added feature of the oil feed was that it would back off 
the tension at high RPM when the cams have more momentum--clever, but 
not worth the leaks, if you ask me).  Given the failures we've all 
heard about with the mechanical tensioner, and the fact that the 
parts for this purely spring-based tensioner are already all there, I 
wouldn't think of doing anything else.  (I used the Zat tensioner for 
26,000 miles before I thought of this, and it worked, but it scared 
the hell out of me, in principle, and on one cold morning when I felt 
the belt tension, it felt like it was about to fall off!)

Joe Elliott
'82 GTV-6

At 5:36 AM +0000 9/15/04, alfa-digest wrote:

> Does rebuilding it(changing all the gaskets) even help?
> An alfa mechanic told me, that it doesen't help for long as the problem
> is that the piston shaft is damaged,
> so no matter what kind of gasket you install, it will start to leak in a
> short while. He said it was not really worth
> the effort. Not done that myself and having a leaking tensioner I'm just
> asking is that so from your experience?
>
> Regards, Ales Golob
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