My six is of the road at the moment because it started to run a bit rough which I tracked down to be a loose cambelt.

The tensioner pulley and idler pulley seem to be fine but as I crank the engine over the belt becomes looser and tighter at opposite sides of the run, so if its loose between the cams its very loose at the bottom and vice-versa, any ideas what could have caused this?

Also when I pin the crank pulley I can get a pin in the inlet cam but seems to be tight getting one fully into the exhaust cam pulley! Is it just a case of adjusting the cam pulley slightly with a socket on the cam bolt to get the pin in to the alignment hole properly.

Also in auto data it says to loosen of the cam pulley bolts and rotate fully clockwise - why do you have to do this? Doesnt this just put them back in the same position or am I missing something here?

Any advice welcome

*edit* am I right in saying that there is an element of play in the elongated slot the cam pulley fits in and it has to be rotated fully clockwise in this region when the cam pulley bolt is loosened and the new belt applied?

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Team Peugeot Sport 308 Gti�

Black T'99 Gti - may she rest in peace - written off in a shunt on the A329m

No i dont believe there is a hole in the gearbox to lock up the flywheel on the XU's.

Im getting hold of a billet alloy one shortly so i can check to see if it has slipped.

Although as said everything seems to line up pretty much, I didnt have to much time to play around with it the other day, Im guessing you can manipulate the pulleys by hand if they are slightly out in order to get your locking pins into the cam pulleys?

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Team Peugeot Sport 308 Gti�

Black T'99 Gti - may she rest in peace - written off in a shunt on the A329m

I'd say fit it yourself and then once you can drive it safely enough take it to a garage to be inspected for correct setting. That what we did with mine. If i was you i'd only use a pug waterpump as my gsf one didnt last long at all.

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See the sheer power and might of the lesser known burrowing owl.

No , there is no hole in the gearbox to lock up the flywheel on the XU.
believe me you better off with that stupid tiny hole that TU engines have.
you'll just need to redo the timing again till the 2 pins fits easily in their holes.
i did it many times ,with no need to special tools
, made by myself the locking pins.

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French military victories?
Did you mean French military defeats?

Well its looking promising, I heard a tapper down at Ace Cafe a couple of weeks ago and mine doesnt sound like that, no evident 'tap' as such, just sort of noisy. Cruising along at around 3k revs you can hear a bit of a tap which is what prompted me to invetigate.

Also as said the timing holes have pretty much all lined up for me so this must be promising? Put it this way if it had jumped a tooth or two there is no way those pulleys would be lining up right?

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Team Peugeot Sport 308 Gti�

Black T'99 Gti - may she rest in peace - written off in a shunt on the A329m

Wouldnt think they would be anywhere near to be honest. You may be lucky.

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See the sheer power and might of the lesser known burrowing owl.

Update on this - I took the plunge and did my first cambelt on a 16v car this weekend

All went according to plan and the engine is running much sweeter now with no tap. The locking pins all lined up so it hadnt slipped or anything fortunetly!

As said earlier in the thread the belt was getting tighter and looser at either end as the crank rotated causing it to run very noisily

I couldn’t really fault any of the components I took off apart from the cambelt itself which looked very tired for the relatively short distance of 20k it had covered. The water pump had covered 55k and had started to leak a little moisture nothing major and the bearing felt tired to but was still reasonably smooth. There was a little play side to side on the tensioner pulley and the other one was fine.

The only reason I can come up with as to why the belt failed so early is that it was was fitted poorly to begin with!

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Team Peugeot Sport 308 Gti�

Black T'99 Gti - may she rest in peace - written off in a shunt on the A329m

This happened to me the first time I did a Timing Belt on a GTI-6, what happened was the camshaft sprockets where turning clockwise slightly as I tightened up the centre nuts, this led to an unevenly tensioned belt (slack,tight,slack,tight, etc), there is a special tool to prevent the camshaft sprockets moving when you tighten the centre nut as shown in the Autodata faq, I made one up from a couple of bits of wood and a bolt and it did the trick i.e. I achieved a evenly tensioned belt all round.

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Team Supercharged Gti-6™

I recognize that bottom pic from somewhere

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Team Supercharged Gti-6™

Even though this was my first attempt at a 16v car I spotted this problem.

Initially I did the belt up to much which caused the pulleys to whine but when I retentioned the belt I noticed that when doing up the cam pulley bolt it was causing the pulley itself to rotate clockwise.

I stopped this from occuring by applying even pressure in the ooposite direction with a screwdriver on a cut out in the pulley itself - seemed to do the trick!

It is very tempting to do the belt up to tight when tensioning a cambelt but the trick is to have the belt not tight but controlled!

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Team Peugeot Sport 308 Gti�

Black T'99 Gti - may she rest in peace - written off in a shunt on the A329m