Hi everyone again. I just sent this to one of our customers:
If your tensioners are running fine, and not making any additional noise, then you should be ok. Seems to affect cars right away, with obvious noisy results. This is new info to me, and didn't make it into the 101 Book. I'm investigating, and will update the
www.101projects.com website when more specific information becomes available.
All of this information is new to us here at Pelican. We want to make sure that the parts that we are selling are quality, and won't damage or destroy your motor. Here are some facts from our neck of the woods:
- From the tensioners that we've sold (and we've sold a lot of them in the past year), we've had two returns for apparent failures. This accounts for about a 1% rate. In the past it was rarer to hear of a chain tensioner not functioning properly out of the box.
- If the chain tensioner is not working properly, you will hear it when you start your engine. Chain failure should not happen (haven't heard of this happening yet...) because these tensioners are both spring and pressure-fed. If the pressure part of the tensioner doesn't work, the spring part will. Granted, it won't hold as strong as the pressure-fed part, but it is designed to keep the chain tight when there is no oil pressure (starting the car, etc.)
- When installing new tensioners, if you hear a loud rattling noise from the chain housing, then your chain tensioner probably is only running using the spring, and not the oil. On a new install, it will take a few moments for pressure to build up in the chain tensioner.
- I believe that all of these units are manufactured by the same manufacturer. I don't believe that the aftermarker 'crowd' gets the second, or inferior lot. Spending many years in manufacturing, I doubt that they divide up the piles into good, better, and bad. It doesn't make any sense, as I am sure that there are tolerance specs on these units that have to be met no matter where they are sold.
- No one that we know of (in the world) has had their motor damaged from a recent chain tensioner installation and failure.
It would appear that this may be a new problem or new procedure for these new style tensioners. Again, I do not have enough information on this yet to form an opinion either way. Regardless, it seems that only a small number of tensioners are affected either way.
I'll keep everyone posted...
-Wayne