Thread: 300TDi timing belt

No drama, quite straightforward. Takes about an hour, to an hour and a half.

Not too much to remove. Fan shroud and fan, ac and alt belts and tensioner, crank pulley and timing cover.
Follow the instructions, and it's a piece of cake.

(probably the hardest part is getting the new belt on, but once you loosen the 3 pump bolts, it's not bad. - just make sure you have the pump and flywheel pins in place.)

I found this article very useful when I did mine http://www.difflock.com/servicing/30...lt/index.shtml

I'd like to concur with the responses above, - no rocket science involved - I'd only add that my first change took me around 6hrs (thats just me - a little slow and cautious). I did my 5th belt change on the weekend for a mate and it still took over 3hrs with both of us working on it. The last two I havent bothered removing the radiator or using the locating pin thru the bellhousing into the flywheel - just set it by eye (still used the pump pin thou). Make sure you have a good puller on hand to remove the harmonic balancer and make sure you do the crank bolt up very tightly during reassembly and use a strong thread locking fluid. I also noticed that the kits are now saying you dont need to rotate the crank after assembly and then re-tension the belt, but I'd recommend still re-tensioning. I had to check one of my changes and noticed that the belt had lost almost all its tension after running for only a few minutes, so I'm glad I checked it. So I would recommend rotating the belt a few revolutions and re-tightening.

Hi Taz,
Just out of interest how are you determining TDC without locking the flywheel? I can't use the flywheel method as the drive plate was replaced & the notch does not line up for some reason now, I recall the mechanic saying the holes didn't line up on the new drive plate so he had to elongate them a bit, I was 1200k from home so had no option to accept this dodgy work at the time.
When I replace the belt now I just line up the woodruff key on the crank so its at 12 o'clock & hope for the best!
Cheers
Mark