View single post by Mark Rosenbaum
 Posted: 07-22-2005 02:42 pm
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Mark Rosenbaum



Joined: 03-12-2005
Location: Kingman, Arizona USA
Posts: 532
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 The crankshaft gear is steel and shouldn't show much if any wear, so I'm curious as to why you'd want to replace it.  For the others, if no individual has a spare set of new gears for sale, perhaps one of the various online Lotus suppliers such as Dave Bean will have some in stock.  Alternately, the cost of a changeover to the newer style timing belt isn't all that much more than replacing all four gears (though one must also modify the engine front cover), so you may wish to investigate that option as well.

Before going to the expense of replacing the timing belt gears, there are a couple of other things you might try:

(1)  Temporarily remove the fan belt to make sure the whine isn't caused by a bad bearing in the water pump or alternator.

(2)  Apply an aerosol belt dressing to the timing belt and see if that stops the noise.  If so, then the cause is slippage between belt and gears.  If that's the case, and if you have access to an abrasive blaster ('bead blaster'), you might try roughing up the contact area of the gears to increase friction.  This may increase belt wear slightly, but belts are cheap compared to the gears.

Re the hurricane, here in Arizona our weather comes from the Pacific, so we get 'monsoons' rather than hurricanes about this time each year.  They're quite mild in comparison.