Quote:
Originally Posted by utopia
How critical is the belt tension anyway....?
Ok, I accept that too tight could cause extra stress on the tensioner roller etc, and too loose may cause accelerated belt wear or even cause the belts to jump teeth, but surely there must be a pretty wide tolerance between these two extremes.
I can't see that belt tension would affect valve timing or engine performance to any significant extent.
So why all the complicated methods ?
Is it perhaps just that the use of a factory-specified gizmo leads to a more reliably consistent result, eliminating any variations that may otherwise occur between different mechanics when performing an adjustment that relies on a bit of interpretation or "feel" ?
Personally (and I've only done mine twice, so I'm no expert) I use the allen key method, but I also give the belts a twist, and generally tug them around until I've got a good feel for the tension from a number of different perspectives.
I also recheck them after a couple of hundred miles.
And .......why allen keys anyway ? Surely a short piece of round (rather than hexagonal) bar would be a more suitable gauge.....??
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Excellent point, I've been changing and tensioning industrial kevlar belts on printing machines for 20 odd years - without a written tension spec. other than "not too loose and not too tight" and anyway most car belts which on the face of it do more work, last donkeys years longer, and are tensioned with guesswork see the 60,000 mile interval with no time limit.
I had a Pantah for three years without changing the belts, and it was laid up in a shed for two years before I bought it and the previous owner hadn't changed them from new. As far as I know it could still be on the standard belts..
hmmmmm my pantahhhh - drifts off into a trance.....what a bike....
Could this fear about Ducati's shredding belts if you dont change them every two years and tension them with a harmonic sonic screwdriver lithium crystal tricorder just paranoid mythology?
I saw a photo of an old removed set 2 yrs old and a new set side by side, and apart from a little fading of the print the condition of the old belts looked fine to me. The caption said "the old belts looked like they were ready to be changed" -- Not to me they didn't!
I'll use an allen key as its a nice simple, mechanical well used method. (I don't have a 5mm and 6mm metal bar handy, or it'd do just as well)