jdmh22hatch
Member
I'm wondering if someone can explain to me how the h22 auto tensioner works. Sounds like a stupid question, but I was under the impression that the auto tensioner would add tension as needed to compensate for belt wear. However, the problem I've been having is that after sitting for a night, my timing belt will have no tension on it in the morning. The first time I ran into this, I didn't want to start the car, so I turned the engine a couple times by hand, and the tension came back. Every day though, I have no tension on the belt in the morning, but the car will start and run fine, and tension returns. It seems to have to sit for an extended period before the tension will back off. I always thought that the auto tensioner would add tension, but never lose it, or at the very least, once tension was gone it would not return. Now I'm really not sure. Is this the way it was designed to work, or is this a sure sign of failure. Additionally, I do have a noise coming from the timing belt area, which I seem to have narrowed down to coming from the cam gears right under the timing belt cover portion of the valve cover. It's a whine, most audible at curb idle, but can be heard right up to about 4k rpm. Sounds almost like bearing noise to me, although it could possibly be timing belt rubbing in the cover. However, I understand how hard it is for someone to diagnose a noise they can't hear, but that was not really the purpose of writing that. I'm not sure if this is related to a possibly failing auto tensioner or not, but it might help if someone else has had the same problems or symptoms I'm having. By the way, I swapped the engine in about a month ago, and have 4000kms including a long road trip on it (20 hours of solid driving over a two day period) and only the whine has gotten slightly more audible, but timing belt tension issues have been unnaffected since started the engine for the first time. If anyone can possibly help me it would be greatly appreciated, because I'd like to catch a possible tensioner failure before I do major damage.