Are these valves bent?






Cam is at TDC. First time doing belts. Tried tensioning and spinning the motor, all timing marks perfectly lined up. Felt resistance at about half way around my first revolution. Immediately panicked and ripped off the intake.

 

Your photos don't show enough detail. However, it takes quite a bit of force to bend a valve when turning the engine over. Only you know how much torque you put on it. The resistance you felt was most likely all the pistons changing direction at the same time. I'll bet you turned the engine over very slowly the first time around. Repeat that and see if you feel what you suspected was valve clash. I'll bet you're just fine.

 

That was the response I was hoping for, I had nothing short of a heart attack as a first timer I have no idea the difference between compression force and toasting a valve. I’m just hoping all my over thinking leading up to that moment would have helped me stop myself from doing something too like that. Thanks for the speedy reply 👍🏻

 

To confirm/deny...why not run a compression/leakdown?

 

Both of those are exactly what I would recommend to anyone else as well in fact I may do a leak down test just to be extra sure.

I was waiting on a tensioner to arrive and that came so I completely reassembled everything and installed the two new belts. Everything is perfectly in time and the preliminary tension I’ve set on the belts is the 90 degree twist and being able to spin the water pump on the t belt.

from this point I’m planning on getting it into a shop to have the belts tensioned properly and have them triple check all my work. That’s when I was gonna have them do either of those tests if not just to check the overall health of the motor anyways. I don’t have the tools to do a leak down myself and if I did screw something up I don’t want to crank the engine over with the starter.

if it’s any help, I was only 90 degrees in from TDC when I started getting all that resistance. But I wasn’t using a cheater bar and I didn’t muscle passed it. I have some similar photos of the intake valves from prior to messing with the belts and in comparing everything looks totally okay.

 

Did you remove the plugs before turning the engine?

 

No, I didn’t so there was full compression inside the block. I could hear it building in the crank case too.

The reason why I was freaking out a little bit was because I could see the belt flex before the gears would move. I got super paranoid that the crank maybe jumped a tooth or two and then when I hit that resistance it was very spring like. If I applied pressure and then let go, everything would spin backwards. I was worried that that spring like behavior was the valves deforming. Once I hit 90 degrees on the crank the engine felt stuck if that makes any sense. I’ve spun it with plugs in before and it never felt like that which was the real source of my paranoia.

 

I always use a flywheel lock when changing belt.
Learned that the hard way. The only way to see if valves are bent, is to take the head of.

 

Yeah I got a little cocky and just put the car in 5th gear after lining everything up. Figured that would be perfect so I could rotate the cam a tooth forward and then rotate the crank a tooth forward to take the slack out of the belt before tensioning it.

FWIW everything is back dead on time now. Gonna leave everything that’s left in a trusted shops hands.

The irony is that I changed the belts this weekend because I’ve been putting off replacing my 26 year old belts and rollers lol. Was afraid of the belt snapping and destroying the valves after all the horror stories I read on here.

 

Just a quick update, started up the car today and it ran perfectly!

 

Okaayyy I guess I’m not out of the woods?

After resetting the timing and starting the car I decided to put everything back to TDC in prep to get towed to a shop for final tensioning... and something peculiar that I’ve seen on a few other posts as well, but my cam is suddenly 180 degrees out of time. Balance Sprockets are both dead on in time still, had no trouble at all getting back to TDC but my cam mark is completely facing the wrong way. How the hell did that happen?

I understand that the cam spins twice for every once the crank spins but usually the cam gear will line up before the crank not the other way around.

The car started and ran perfectly fine as well It idled great. Can anybody explain what it is I’m seeing?

Edit: Nvm I’m the worlds biggest moron. 180 on the cam and TDC at the crank. Another 360 on the crank will bring everything back exactly to TDC.

 

LOL calm down man..

you might should have more faith in yourself than you seem to..

 

Yeah, what he said.

These cars are not so horribly complex. Not as dirt-simple as an 8V VW, but not that much more complex.