Knock, knock… whos there?

Anyone who has been following me on Instagram recently will have seen that there have been a few ups and downs with the Skyline. (if you’re not following me on social media yet, the links are in the website footer.)

As you may recall I was due to be driving in a charity event at Driftland at the beginning of May. This was cut short however when just two days before the event I started to hear a tapping from the engine.

After consulting a couple of friends I feared the worst and decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to tow the car all the way up to Scotland just to have it die on me a couple of laps into the event. I, unfortunately, had to give up my spot and turn my attention to diagnosing and confirming the problem, before looking into possible solutions.

We started by listening around the engine bay to see if we could pinpoint where the tapping was coming from. Initially, we thought it to be coming from the back of the engine near the top so we stripped it down to the cams and we were surprised to see that everything looked fine here, there were no bits of metal and no real damage to the camshafts. The noise we heard at the back was clearly a red herring!

Next, we started to look down the front of the engine and using a makeshift stethoscope (a long screwdriver) we could hear a noise coming from the cam angle sensor. Taking it off and inspecting the sensor we found that there was indeed a problem here the bearings inside the sensor were shot and needed to be replaced. A few quid later and a lot of frustration and the sensor was like new. But sadly this was not the cause of the problem.

Continuing to listen around the engine with our stethoscope finally we settled on the water pump being the cause of the noise.

So off I went to the internets to buy a new water pump, and while I was at it I thought it best to replace the timing belt, idler pulley, and tensioner pulley, alternator belt and power steering pump belt since they all had to come off to give me access to the water pump.

Stripping down the engine it soon became clear that I was on the right tracks, the timing belt clearly had never been changed, and the bearings in the idler and tensioner pulleys were both shot!

Finally getting the water pump off I was relieved to find bearing in the water pump was also shot and when you spun the impeller it made a terrible noise. Now it came time to put the engine back together and this is where my next problem came…

Behind the crank pulley, there is a large concave washer which at the time I thought I had put on the right way, it later turned out when I started the engine it wasn’t and ended up chewing up the brand new timing belt. So back to the internet I went and ordered another timing belt.

When it arrived I stripped the engine down AGAIN, removed the knackered belt which by now had made a right mess behind the metal cover, fitted the new complete belt (thankfully the previous belt hadn’t snapped or skipped a tooth so the everything still lined up), put the engine back together and finally the only thing left to do now was to turn the key and try it again.

Aside from a whine from one of the auxiliary belts being a tiny bit too tight, the engine is now working perfectly again, in fact, I would go so far as to say it’s better than ever!