in here!
and though it may have been all in my mind seemed to be down on power over the last few miles
home although it was late, cold and I thought nothing of it until I investigated the following morning.
On starting there was an unmistakable additional sound of impending mechanical calamity so I
switched off and decided as there are a whole raft of additional issues to resolve I'd get back to it
when i was ready and use the Xantia V6 in the meantime.
Well, today I decided to spare some time investigating in the sunshine and systematically removed
the belts off the engine in a process of elimination to determine just what the hell the angry loose
pulley sound on the engine. I did eventually find the cause of the problem:
the damned tensioner outer bearing race decided to part company with its inner and leave the
timing belt clinging on by it's fingernails:
It seems the timing has gone AWOL sufficiently to allow a delay of the belt to 'slap' the valves with
the pistons yet until I discovered the true enormity of the failure the engine has consistently started
immediately and apart from the slap otherwise sounds spot on with the timing with no pops/bangs
etc through the exhaust. The timing belt currently appears to be just in place by willpower and the
lower timing cover holding it!!
Is it possible the slackening of the timing belt has allowed the belt to either jump a few teeth but
not bend the exhaust valves!? I know a snapped belt on a 2.0i will bend all 4 exhaust valves from a
similar failure a few years ago on another Xm. I don't make a habit of running the cars to the limit
on their belts and am annoyed that a precautionary recent timing belt on this car (it's showing 30k
miles!!
) by an Indy specialist barely a few 1000k miles ago for the previous owner didn't catch a duff or deteriorating tensioner. I've had absolutely no inkling of the sound of a failing tensioner either!!
I'm expecting to actually hand turn the engine to timing reference tomorrow and see just how out
of true it all is between top and bottom and go from there and have a full new kit and water pump
in stock to fix the obvious outward problem but fear the valves may be mullared and am not in the
right frame of mind for a cylinder head off job. Just as well it's just had an MOT and been taxed as
otherwise it may have been swapped for another car I have in stock...
that said, does anyone have a spare head off a 2.0i (don't think turbo specific matters) or has a spare
set of valves they don't mind selling to keep this particular Xm going long term?
bollocks
Andrew
but they would be available, i would think the valves are ok though, dispite half hanging over the cutouts in the piston crown they can take a little knock without too much damage, if the belt had let go altogether it would almost certainly of been bad news, but we wont dwell on that 
As I said, bollocks!!
At least you'd expect hassles with a full v6 or 2.5TD engine bay
) .