Timing belt-Close call

I decided to drop the engine on the Spider yesterday and give it a fresh service . If I am able to sell it great, if not it will be perfect for me .

---- I decided to pull the motor even after a service was performed to my knowledge 5000 miles ago.


Good thing.....Check out the hole in this belt!!!!!!
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Some pics yesterday
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Ready to go back up in the morning! New belts, hoses, plugs, all the goodies.....Thanks again Ricambi for the overnight weasel delivery!!!!!!
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Weasel---Did u paint the clutch housing or polish it? Close call on the belt for sure....

 

Just painted with ceramic paint.....Turned out pretty good IMO anyway....

 

Does look very nice...

 

Thanks!

 

That was a close call.

It sure must be nice to have all that space to work in, not to mention a lift.

 

I was doing a belt service on my 308 that I owned 15 years ago and when I pulled the belts one of them had a hole punched through it about the size pencil eraser. Must have been a small rock getting caught between the belt and the pulley in my case. Your situation I'm not sure about since the belts are incased in the belt covers fairly throughly, unlike the 308s that don't have much protection. Lucky for you and me that the belt didn't jump a cog.

 

My heart skipped a beat for sure on that finding


The lift helps alot, most importantly though is the stand it's on.....We had the engine cradle made by the people that build our jet engine slings and specialty tools. It has a hydraulic ram at all four corners so alignment is a snap going back in....

 

So was that a major completed in less than one day?? I'm driving it to your place next time!

Looks great, and close call with that belt, whew.

 

Well, it will be 3 days in all actually....We started Monday AM and it should be running tomorrow night....

Don't feel bad Jay.....Keep in mind that there are 2 to 3 of us on it all day, each day, which still will equal roughly 70-80 man hours.....

Take care!!!.....Hows your beauty running?

 

THer is no such thing as too many tools ...... !!! Great pics .... I almost can't wait until my major is due .......... then I can install some of those lightweight 'crossdrilled' timing belts you have there .......

 

ok I feel better, haha. I don't care to count how many man hours I put in...but I'm sure the second one would be much much faster having learned the tricks the first time.

Running fantastic, driving her every day that's not raining...and loving the paddle shift even more every day!

 

sabotage? ice pick? how else does a hole form there? (not meaning to stir up trouble, but is there a possibility that a previous mechanic had a kid that needed braces? it's not unheard of, as some hidden-camera exposes have shown.)

 

+1. I was thinking the exact same thing! Amazing, do a 30K major in approximately one day! That's supposed to take a minimum of 30 hours. The Michael Phelps of Ferrari mechanics!!

Glad that belt did let go or jump a tooth on the cam drive sprocket.

 

Would be a good time to punt those old stock cats as well.
Clutch housing looks awesome! Ceramic paint...great idea.
-Billy

 

I did a 512TR a number of years ago that had a hole about twice that big in it. A coworker at the time had spent years working on Formula Atlantic cars which at the time used Cosworth BDA's and had no belt covers. He said holes from rocks were not uncommon and they never had a belt failure from them. Belts can take a lot when they are new and pliable.

 

RifleDriver, what could cause a 512TR to get a hole like that in the belt? I sort of thought that a Testarossa/TR had the timing belt enclosed in a cover where objects could not get inside - or does it have openings?

An enquiring 86 Testarossa owner would like to know - (I guess).

 

Road debris. The belts are not completely enclosed. Just enough to let stuff in and not out.

From under the car there are lots of places where you can see it. I once was tuning one and I dropped my 5 inch long 3 mm allen wrench. It bounced off the back of the A/C compressor and went straight into the belt drive while the engine was running.

We do not allow mechanics to drop and lose ANYTHING under the hood of a belt drive car. I recently explained to a new guy that I didn't care if it took 2 days he HAD to find a nut he dropped. I have seen too many belts taken out by something dropped under the hood.

But there is no good reason for these cars to cost more than a Toyota to fix .......Right?

 

Only if a Toyota mechanic would care to look for a missing nut for two days. I wonder how much the clown who welded Daves piston thought these cost.

 

Thanks, RifleDriver.

I do remember the 328 or 348 guy that picked up a bolt on the road and it somehow got into an opening and took out a belt tooth. I guess I was just hoping that the Testarossa was sealed up better than that.

Maybe I should be getting under there with some duct tape? - but no; that would probably fragment itself and get into the works.

What you are saying is that essentially, we could go get a belt service done, pick up a rock on the way home, and be SOL.

 

If I was worried about it I wouldn't have one.

My point is 2 things

One. If it was a real problem we wouldn't be able to keep these cars on the road. The simple fact of the matter is that well maintained examples are reliable to the extreme.

And two is. The belts experience and need to survive a lot of different things. It is about a lot more than simply making the cams go round and round in a laboratory environment. The self proclaimed experts around here have made a lot of pitches and spread a lot of disinformation based on nothing but their own narrow and limited experience and examination of the facts and have tried to make the case that the service recommendations are based on profit motive and not real world experience. Real world experience that the people in the business, Ferrari and Cosworth who really started the belt drive craze in fact do have.

Thats a long way of saying newer belts can survive a lot of that and old belts cannot.

 

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. When replacing my engine lid pneumatic struts, I dropped the nyloc nut securing the bottom of the right-hand strut (tight fit) because of wearing too large, cheap vinyl gloves. I took me over a day to find it!!! That sucked, BIG TIME!! But, I was worried that it might cause a cam belt failure.

 

You're right...It sucks very big time.