Carrerra oil fed tensioner - rebuild

[totle]

Hi,

There is rebuild kit for the 901 and 930 chain tensioner, but I have not seen this kit for the carrera oil-fed tensioner.

Is there such a kit to by, or is there any company that rebuild these oil-fed tensioners ?

[gled49]

There’s nothing to rebuild, if all the pieces are there. Tin cap, spring, etc. Sometimes the spiral bleed port get plugged, disassemble, drive out hardened tip, clean, reassemble piston, test that it flows, reassemble tensioner and install.

[dannobee]

There's a couple of things that you can do to them to make them truly bulletproof and race worthy. As gled said, there's nothing really to "rebuild," only mods that should be performed.

Search for "Jerry Woods tensioner." It involves disassembling the tensioner and adding a shim made from tubing (or two copper washers from the cam oil line banjo bolt) to the bottom of the piston. If you do the search, you'll see how to disassemble the tensioner and how to measure for the thickness of the shim needed.

Also, the top air bleed cover will occasionally pop out, along with the ball and spring. At this point the tensioner will become floppy/sloppy. The fix is to drill two small holes in the body so that a piece of wire can be positioned to hold the cover in place should it try to pop out. This mod should also come up if you do a search.

[totle]

I have done the jerry Woods mod before. A good safety thing to do.
Have one tensioner that failed from time to time resulting in ratte noise was a pita to investigihate as it was hard to locate.

Rebuilding a couple of engines and want to test the tensioner to make sure the are good.

Ant good procedure to do so?

[gled49]

Remove the piston, turn upside down, fill with brake clean, witness the fluid leaking out the bleed port or apply some air pressure to help. That’s how it works. Any air in the system, bleeds out the port to maintain hydraulic lock. Do the housing bleed mod that Dan suggested.

[totle]

Tried to google the bleeding mod. Did not find any howto

[dannobee]

Fill the reservoir up with engine oil, put the piston back in, then sloooowly squeeze the tensioner with a vise or C-clamp. As you tighten the vise, the air will come out of the bleed at the top of the piston. Put a catch can underneath to catch the drippings.

The other method is to assemble everything, then add oil through the oil feed port, using a hand held oil can (or anything else that can add a little pressure while filling with oil). Keep going until you see the oil coming out of the air bleed.

Or just assemble everything in the engine and start it up. It'll have enough oil pressure to quiet down any noises in less than a second if the engine was primed before starting (assuming new tensioners and not some crusty grimy old ones).

I put in a LOT of tensioner kits just doing the latter and never had a problem.