Everything is OK til it's not. Then it's not OK. You can wait til you hear it. Then it'll go away. Molten metal self-lubricates. Yep. Couldn't happen to me....somebody musta screwed up....not MY guy, though. Some will go a lifetime, some won't. Wonder what the odds are? Tick, tick, tick.....
26 years old and only 1900 miles on it? - What a tragic waste of a great car! As for your technician: It's all very well him saying it's not necessary to replace the belts after 10 years, 16 years, or ever at all, but if your old cambelt should fail and smash your engine to bits, is he going to put it right for free? - I'm suspecting not! Here in the UK, a belt service at a reputable Ferrari specialist is @ £1700 (@ $2183) ( http://www.theferraricentre.com/workshop/34834-mondial-pricing/ ). Over a 3 year period, that works out to being @ £47 ($60) per month, or @ £1.57 ($2) per day! £1.57 ($2) per day for peace of mind Vs gambling on your engine not smashing itself to bits? - That's a no brainer to me! You could play Russian roulette, put a gun to your head a thousand times, pull the trigger, and get away with it - Doesn't make it a safe game to play! (NOTE: I have no affiliation with The Ferrari Centre at all, and the link posted is simply to give an example of UK pricing from a trusted Ferrari specialist)
One of those tricky situations for a mechanic. If he says you don’t need it, he’s saving you time and lots of money. If something goes majorly wrong, he gave you bad advice and should have known better. Not a position I’d like to be in.
I really want to know how it has been determined that the tensioner is about to fail? It has plenty of grease and does not look to have debris in it. A missing seal does not equate imminent failure. How long has the seal been missing? Why did it fall out? They don't do that on their own. My bet is it was damaged at time of installation. Now I am a believer in sticking to the proper belt replacement intervals but this entire post is about bad workmanship and not sticking to service schedules. If the scaremongering need progress, preach quality service, not what happened to that POS. I have said it a lot but it falls on deaf ears. I have fixed a lot of Ferrari motors from broken belts but in over 40 years I have yet to fix a damaged Ferrari motor from a bad tensioner bearing. And that includes a lot of years in 2 of the biggest dealers in the world.
Another factor that bears consideration is the environment that the car is subjected to. Especially when wondering about the corrosion on the tensioner pivots. If the car is driven in the rain, or has the engine washed and even stored in a unheated garage to allow condensation to form on engine components, that will have a negative effect. I have experienced sealed bearing failures in farm equipment that occurs right after a long storage period. The grease would be hardened and provide zero lubrication, resulting in noisey operation and subsequent failure. Just a thought.
Age is a real enemy of sealed bearings and so is detergent washing or steam cleaning, neither of which should be done until the engine is out for servicing.
100%. The belt is only one part of the system. Most people obsess about "belt" life when its often times the other parts of the systems that fail thereby causing the a belt (timing or accessory) to fail. Bring on the "bearing" threads!
If you want to clean your engine do the engine out service early and clean away. If this is done and you do not have oil leaks or coolant leaks the engine stays relatively clean between services. Mine gets dirty from below a bit due to the F1 actuator weeping a little. Does not even weep enough to drip on floor but obviously its gett8ng a bit of oil on bottom of engine
I deal with bearings every day at work and the worst ones are the china bearings. more than half either have very little or no grease when I pop off the cover. worse yet ive seen a couple euro bearings with little grease in them. when I come across this ill repack them with mobile 1 synthetic.
yes but a bearing without enough grease will fail, you want the bearing to be able to roll. Granted Ive seen overpacked bearing last a long time. We had a discharge bearing wanting to fail turning the grease brown. With a full rebuild scheduled in 3 months we would basically flush it during the preventive maintenance schedule every 15 days with new grease while running. An unscheduled shutdown at the time would have been 7 to 10 thousand dollars a minute =/
You don't pack, over pack, under pack, oil or lubricate a 2nd hand bearing. You have to be joking. The bearing reference here is the tensioner bearing on a ferrari engine. The correct procedure is to replace it with a new one of decent quality. You lift the heads off a bent valve ferrari engine and it too will start costing 10s of thousands...
I don't think we were talking about repacking bearing. At least I wasn't. I was only pointing out that an over packed bearing can mead to failure just as an under packed bearing can. I'll leave it to bearing manufactures to provide new bearing correctly lubricated.
Solution looking for a problem! Over grease usually refers to overzealous use of the high pressure greasegun. No one is doing that with a rubber sealed bearing. The technology is long known. Here is a calculator https://www.machinerylubrication.com/Read/29620/grease-quantity-frequency
Sealed bearings are just that. Sealed. By the time its dry or suspect in any way, it is replaced. Even if the tensioner bearings feel ok at timing belt change, replace them. Otherwise, risk asking yourself, will these bearings last another belt life? Its a no brainer while you are in there. If you can't spring for 2 new hill bearings well goodness help the rest of the job you are doing.
Here is another OK nonbelievers. The tensioner bearing were replaced for the first time on my 308 after 25 years/27k mikes back in 2010. They still, to this day, spin smoothly. Tensioner bearing on my wife's Honda, 18 years, 105k miles. Sure, not a Ferrari, but 18 years, 105k miles. And these are just off the shelf, run of the mill bearing. Nothing special like Hill bearings that are supposed to be so superior that you dare not used anything else. Frankly I sick and tired hearing about how all these specially made, super high quality parts for Ferraris constantly need to be changed when a $20 bearing has no problem going 20 years, 100k miles. I'm not saying don't change them, but gees the effing paranoid associated with these cars is ridiculous. Why don't alternators fail all that often? The alternator turns 2 to 3 time faster than the engine. The alternator bearings take a real beating compared to the tensioners. I mean, WTF, while your in there. How about the idlers and tensioners on a Porsche serpentine belt? There are 3 of them. No one seems to change them every 40k miles (or is it 60k) when the serpentine belts is (supposed) to be changed. And again, they run about twice the engine speed.
Alternator fails, no big deal. Porsche belt flies off, no big deal. Honda timing belt breaks, scrap it and buy another honda.
