How can i tell if my timing belt is off?

[10thcb7]

Just wondering how i can tell if my timing belt is busted?

[nine_deuce]

Your car won't start?

[totaldoughnut]

Put the crank at tdc, pull the valve cover, then check and see if the cam timing marks line up correctly.

The engine will start if its one or a couple teeth off, just run like crap. Anymore than that and you may get interference.

Properly timed means the crank is at tdc, the cam pully lines are lines up with the head with the word up actually on top, and you can feel rocker arm lash at #1.

[10thcb7]

Your car won't start?

yeah my car wont start. I took the oil cap off and saw the lifters open up and down. Is that enough to say that the belt is still on ?

[Father Time]

yeah my car wont start. I took the oil cap off and saw the lifters open up and down. Is that enough to say that the belt is still on ?

Take off your valve cover and look at the cam gear. No belt or belt ripped and hanging = broken/ busted belt.

[deevergote]

Take off your valve cover and look at the cam gear. No belt or belt ripped and hanging = broken/ busted belt.

Yeah. Pretty simple. If you want to know if it's busted... LOOK AT IT!

If anything in the head moves, the belt is still there... it may be damaged, though (someone recently posted a thread about a timing belt that was shredded to about 1/3 of the normal width)

[10thcb7]

thanks deev

[batever]

take upper timing cover off, not valve cover off, right?

91Accord-LX & totaldoughnut,

I am a little confused by what you are saying.

I am assuming you are suggesting taking off the upper timing belt cover as opposed to the actual valve cover, right,?? because you can't see the timing belt by taking the valve cover off, nor can you see the camshaft timing marks by doing that, unless i am missing something.

Of course, I am a newbie so I definitely MIGHT be missing something!

Also if you take the valve cover off it's $20 for a new gasket.

Just trying to clarify the nomenclature.

[batever]

yeah my car wont start. I took the oil cap off and saw the lifters open up and down. Is that enough to say that the belt is still on ?

Yes, if the lifters are moving, then they are being driven by the timing belt, so it does show that the timing belt is on.

Which is good, because if you've been trying to start it and the starter is turning the crankshaft, but the timing belt is broken, the pistons would definitely.probably hit a couple of valves at least and damaged them. I don't think that's the case, since you say you see the lifters moving (I am assuming that you have someone in the car turning it over for you so you can see them moving--it's the only way I can picture it, unless you are turning the engine by hand)

The reason your car is not starting may be something a lot simpler than the timing belt (I hope so!)

Can you hear the starter turning when you try to turn it over?

I would start by looking at the distributor cap if it suddenly stopped starting one morning, particularly if it's over a year old. If it's not delivering enough electricty to the plugs at the right time, then that would cause the nonstarting situation.

If you can, but it doesn't start, a common reason would be your dist. cap & rotor went bad. If that doesn't fix it, I'd start looking deeper, check the spark plug wires (carefully!) and look at the condition of the spark plugs and spark plug boots.

I would buy all of the above but leave them all in the packaging, just put the dist.cap/rotor on first and see if it works.

But in my experience, almost the only reason my 92 has ever not started was because of the distributor cap and rotor.