How To Properly Time a VR6 With Head Gasket Spacer

what's going on everybody it's charles in this video we're gonna be timing a vr6 engine with a head gasket spacer the spacer that we're gonna be using in this video is the one that drops our compression down to seven to one with this spacer you're gonna need a chain that's one link longer than the factory chain this is the five millimeter head gasket spacer that we're using there is another head gasket spacer that is i think three or three and a half millimeters if you're doing that one you don't need to have the extended chain the smaller one is the one i used on the mark iii vr6 and the chain went on no problem however this one with the extended link chain does have some things you really need to make sure you pay attention to otherwise you're gonna end up with timing faults and if you're timing an r32 engine without a spacer at all i have a video on step-by-step how to do that i'll be sure to link for you guys okay we need to make sure we start with our cylinder head bolted on our camshafts in and our cam plate installed locking our camshafts in place the tool number for that cam plate you need is t10068a and you're really not going to be able to do this job without something to hold the cams in this gear here is actually what holds our intermediate gears into place it also is what drives our oil pump i went ahead and cleaned it we need to put some assembly lubricant on it both here and we'll get some on this bearing now of course we're going to prime the oil pump and all that before we get the car going just like that next we gotta get our cover that holds the shaft in place on there are four screws that hold it on and the screw holes are offset so this only goes on one way also the lines will always point up and down because those are what we use for timing now this is one of the few things on this engine that's actually held in with phillips head screws i prefer to replace these screws whenever i do this job but if you don't you need to make sure you're using red loctite thread chase them clean them all off and put some new red loctite on it if you don't replace them also the torque spec on these is eight newton meters so we'll get out our little torque wrench our little baby one now when it comes to our lower chain whether you're using a head gasket spacer like i am or you're doing this just straight up timing the timing of this chain is going to be the same now for the hardware on our timing side i like to lock tight these with blue loctite or blue thread locker i should say this is a little piece of mind for me these two are the studs that are chain guide rides on so this guy is like this that'll ride there we'll go ahead and snug guides down these two gears are the intermediate gears that bolt to the shaft that we already installed so this front one is what drives the upper chain the back one is what drives the lower chain it's not a bad idea if you have a ton of miles to replace these you can kind of use your best judgment on whether you really need to or not but the gears do get worn out at 200 000 miles it looked like they had replaced this one but not this one so i went ahead and i'm just gonna replace both it's not a place where i want to try and save every penny that i can because as we saw on that other turbo vr6 r32 that we did a teardown a while back these failing will be cat ostrophic that's how our gear is going to go for our lower one we have that shaved down tooth and we can use the mark on the front side of the cover make sure your chain is nice and clean we'll actually take this back off we'll put our chain on now for timing this upper part there's a little arrow you can see it right there on this intermediate gear it needs to point at 12 o'clock to this line that i have highlighted in blue as long as that's the case we'll be just fine we also want to make sure that the loose side of the chain is on the back side towards the back of the engine because this is where our tensioner is going to go if you have the tension over here you're not going to get these timed right put a little thread locker on the hardware for our tensioner you know all things considered this is actually a pretty straightforward engine to time that said i have seen these go sideways from time to time and uh not want to line up so just take your time here and make sure that as you're going you're getting everybody tightened down properly timed properly and aligned properly this is also a job you really want to make sure you have the repair manual uh while you're doing it so that you make sure you get everybody on there correctly okay that's it our bottom chain is timed now because we're installing a head gasket spacer the next steps are going to be quite a bit different we're going to start by putting on our little cam adjuster girdle here this is another opportunity to make sure your oil control rings are where they need to be also very important make sure you lubricate the camshafts before you put this cover on also make sure this the back side is clean and the screen isn't all clogged up or broken or anything like that this is one of those parts that you really need to make sure you're taking your time on i have seen camshafts damaged from this piece just getting put on without as much care as it probably should be so be extra careful on this one i am using new hardware here on jobs like this if you're ever like not sure should i use new hardware do i not need to what's the right choice put new hardware in almost never be a bad investment to put this new hardware in while we're here we can go ahead and plop our uh our new upper timing guide on we got our adjuster bracket plate on next we're going to put our small gear on the intermediate shaft just like that that is a new gear and then i'm just going to run the bolt that holds these two in in by hand that way if we need to take it back off for whatever reason because our timing didn't get lined up perfectly it's super easy and we don't have everything torqued now the chain we're going to be using for this job is one link longer than the stock factory chain this is going to accommodate the bigger head gasket spacer let's go ahead and get our guides put on next i like a little bit of blue thread locker on the ones that don't have it from the factory we'll go ahead and get this bolt in because with this bolt we can just drop our other guide right on it also make sure you're taking care not to damage your head gasket while you're right here we can go ahead and put our top bolts in okay that's pretty much the easy part now is where things get a little tricky we're going to start with our intake cam variator i when we pulled the engine apart made sure i labeled them so they went back where they're supposed to now this is a cam adjuster or cam variator so as you can see it moves this piece right here in the center is actually what is pinned to the cam shaft itself so this simulates us moving the cam shaft and as you can see our chain would ride right here what you want to do is you want to hold the variator or the adjuster by the gear and then take the center section that rotates and go all the way clockwise i put a mark where mine is at all the way clockwise that's locking the cam adjuster in the clockwise position that's also going to be towards the exhaust cam next take some brake parts cleaner and clean this mating surface make sure there's no yuck in it dirt or oil or grease or anything do the same thing for the adjuster make sure that's good and cleaned out even if you're putting a new one on which these things are crazy expensive they're like 400 piece even if you're putting a new one on go ahead and get get it cleaned out and then as you can see there's a little pin right there that pin correlates to an opening on the camshaft you can see there's these three holes right here one hole two hole and then the pin goes in the middle so we're gonna take our cam gear we're going to put it on our cam shaft make sure our blue mark right there is lined up and then we're going to take our new cam adjuster bolt and just thread it in by hand we may have to take this off now you notice i can still move this make sure it stays on your mark now what we're going to do for the cam shafts is we're going to push the cam shafts all the way towards the exhaust side as you can see there's a bit of movement even with the plate installed so you take your 32 millimeter wrench right on the camshaft make sure that your cam is all the way rotated towards the exhaust side of the engine resting on that timing plate the plate should stop the cam from moving and do the same thing for the exhaust camshaft now we have our cam gear on the intake side completely locked out all the way like that my two lines are lined up next we're gonna put our chain on we're gonna have to pull and kind of hold our tensioning guide rail back now we're gonna pretty much ignore the copper colored links on this timing center if you're doing a regular vr no spacer i like to pay attention to said timing marks but for here we don't really need to worry about it we're going to take our chain and we're just gonna drop it down and just let it come down down to here and we're gonna then hook it around the small intermediate gear right down here so you'll notice there's a ton of slack we don't really need to worry too much about this side yet we'll worry about this side when we do our exhaust cam also double check and make sure that your cam shafts themselves are turned all the way up against the plate towards your exhaust side this is going to be important for our adjustment so we're going to take our chain we're going to pull tension on it we're going to make sure we hold our variator all the way to our lines lined up we're going to pull our chain tight and try and wrap it around now you notice what's happening our variators moving see like that now here our timing marks not lined up but we have the right amount of slack see there's no slack here there's no real slack down here in the bottom of the chain if we were to have this lined up look what happens ignore this slack look what happens down here we have slack down here in the bottom gear and we have slack right up here so we can't have any slack down here or down here we need to have it tight but when we have it tight our marks don't line up so what we can do is we can take our 32 millimeter wrench and we can try and move the cam shaft compensate for that so i went back a little bit but now look we actually have more slack right there's a whole big old bunch of slack and the problem with that is if you leave this slack right here when you first start your car your car is going to jump time now we're not interference at this point you still don't want to have to do this again especially when you have the engine out of the car versus in the car it's a lot to get to so you can play around with this adjustment make sure you have no slack here which then in turn is actually the same slack you have up here and that your mark lines up if this doesn't line up up here on the cam you're not right now i actually fought this slack quite a bit trying to get this engine timed up i called hpa and they gave me a really cool trick to try when this doesn't work a lot of times you can play with the cam and move it back and forth up against the plate to get this right but sometimes that doesn't work so if you're struggling to get that lined up and timed up properly here's what you need to do leave your cam plate in make sure that your chain is off of the intermediate gear because we don't want to try and turn the uh the cam chain then what you're going to do is you're going to come over to the crankshaft and you're going to rotate the crankshaft one turn 360 degrees all the way around until your mark on the front side of the crank lines up and the shaved mark that you can see here in blue line up on the back side this is going to put your intermediate gear out of time but our crankshaft is in time and our camshafts aren't time so really where this gear is does not matter it took my brain a minute to get there but it doesn't matter because you're crank and your cams are the only thing that really actually matters so we're going to go around one turn and make sure you are perfectly lined up also remember we created a non-interference engine so you shouldn't have to worry about valves hitting pistons so down here on our intermediate gear you'll notice that the little arrow that we had facing there before it's no longer pointing to this blue line also this mark here is usually at i don't know the six seven o'clock i think seven o'clock position so this gear here not in time but our cams are locked and our crankshaft is in time so this doesn't matter now what we're gonna do we're gonna take our chain we're gonna put it on our bottom gear so we'll take it off our intake gear we'll put it on the bottom then what we're gonna do make sure your cam is all the way locked out i usually hold the camshaft in place and that chain should drop right on just like that now i'm holding it over here so it doesn't flop down but check it out i can't push this up there's no floppity tension down here and our mark is still lined up so for whatever reason that rotation of the crankshaft lines back up everything to make it happy i was super skeptical that it worked so i tried it like three times just to confirm that that did actually set this exactly how we needed it to be so if you're struggling with getting this timed up exactly perfect rotate the crankshaft around one full rotation and try it again it worked perfectly for me this is how in the video that hpa made the chain went on and i fought it for like an hour maybe or so and the whole time i'm thinking i hope this isn't what happens to you guys when i drop something on no problem and you struggle with it but if you do struggle with it you're not alone i struggled with it too all right with our intake done we got to move over to the exhaust side couple of same rules apply make sure you clean both of these mating surfaces free of oil and yuck on our exhaust cam we don't have nearly the amount of movement that we did on our intake cam you can see that that is all we have so we want to make sure that we're fully locked with the center piece clockwise which is where my mark is right there you don't need to do this mark it's just easy at a quick glance to make sure that you're not like over here or here or something like that that you're all the way with this locked clockwise so we'll take this it mounts in the same way one pin lines up with the hole now this one should drop in pretty easy you got to make sure you get it lined up properly with that pin there we go so i'm on the cam shaft itself i'll make sure my my marks line up and then i had to actually push the chain onto the gears to make it go on that makes this very tight you also want to make sure you don't pull this one out of time as well once that's on and your marks are on go ahead and just hand tighten the bolt like that we'll come back and torque them now all of our tension is right here this is exactly where we want it because our chain tensioner it's gonna hold it just like that also make sure you don't rotate the engine around right now because you will definitely throw your engine out of time but this is this is really really tight up here and there's no slack anywhere along what would be towards the front side of the engine on the timing chain all your slack right there next we need to come over to the front side of the engine where our cam plate is and inspect this end of the cam we're looking at the intake cam here and what you'll see is a tiny gap towards the front side of the engine and almost zero gap towards the back side of the engine that is how you want this when it's properly timed this is very important because you saw there's a little bit of wiggle back and forth and we want the camshaft rotated as far towards the exhaust side of the engine as possible so this is roughly what it should look like and i mean that is that is not very much gap right there that's what the intake should look like and the exhaust side should look pretty much the same if your exhaust and your intake cam don't look just like this you need to either adjust the cams with your 32 on the hex part of the camshaft back here or retime it because this is what it's got to look like next we're going to come up to the top side and we're going to do two things we're going to check the slack in our chain at the top as it runs across this guide there should be basically zero slack in this chain if you have a tiny bit take your finger and push your chain tensioner and it should go to almost nothing like i have no slack at the top of this chain that's what you want if it's floppity right here the timing's not right you got to redo it and hey look i can't stress enough don't feel bad if you have to do this a couple of times it took me more than once to get it right too and this is kind of a tricky way to time this engine once you make sure you have no slack there we're going to count 16 rollers between our timing marks right on the variator see where this blue dot is there's a little arrow pointing to one of the teeth and the variator there's also one here on the exhaust cam side the intake is almost straight up and down at 12 o'clock the exhaust is pointing more towards about one and we want to have 16 rollers between those two marks i don't think you can actually get this not set at 16 rollers but this is just one more step to verify and make sure that you got your timing right one two three four five six oh what is that get out of there ew what is that we'll get that out of there let's try again one two three four five six seven eight 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16. so 16 between means you don't count the one past or before and if you got 16 rollers which again i don't know how you can not have 16 rollers here and it either fit or not have a bunch of slack in there but if you got 16 rollers between you did a good job next up we're going to torque our cam adjusters these two bolts here before you do that though i want to make sure that i'm holding tension on this chain so that if something moves a little bit we don't pop out of time this has happened to me before so this is an important step you can either have a second person hold this just like this what i like to do now though is zip tie the tensioning guide to this other guide over here that'll hold tension on it and now we'll still be able to rotate our engine around but we won't have to worry about it popping time if you don't do this and you rotate your engine around you will pop out of time it doesn't matter which vr6 this is that will happen so much so that i wrote myself a warning on the uh the 12 valve plate to make sure that the timing cover is on or i don't want to remove this so be extra careful don't go turning stuff without the chain tensioned like this or having someone hold it or you can even put the cover on but i hate that step i like to verify timing first before putting the cover on so this is my favorite way to do it take our plate out grab your 32 millimeter wrench and go ahead and torque this bolt down it torques to 44 pound feet or 60 newton meters plus another 90 degrees we'll go ahead and do the same thing for our exhaust cam next we need to rotate the crankshaft around two full revolutions this is going to be one full engine cycle also important you don't want to rotate this engine counterclockwise as you're looking at the front side of the engine on the crankshaft if you do that you will mess all kinds of tension and timing up so don't do that i also have the spark plugs out so no worry about building compression which i recommend because then you don't have to fight against compression so that was one and we're coming around to two want to make sure that it's super spot on something to point out when you're seeing this at this angle which the camera is probably four inches up and looking down at it this does not look like it's in time if you come straight at it it is actually exactly in time but when you look at it from a different angle it may not look that way so i like to take a pocket screwdriver and lay it on the timing mark or make sure you get like right eye level with it and double check that it's right if you don't do that you may think oh this looks like it's out of time or worse this looks like it's in time and it's not so make sure you're looking at that at eye level use a prop or something to line it up and make sure that your eyes aren't playing tricks on you because as i'm looking at this in the camera it looks like it is not right and the further i back away you can see it looks it looks less right the further away we get okay the next check we need to do is we need to make sure our cam plate fits if you find that it doesn't go in you may have to move the cams just a touch like just a touch to get it to go in just like that you're basically changing tension now before you take that cam plate back out take your cam with your 32 millimeter wrench and push it all the way to the back side of the engine and make sure that it's locked there that is the proper way to do it with these head gasket spacers next we need to torque our bolt for our intermediate shaft you'll notice i have the support here on the front side of the engine holding that so we don't want our engine to rotate we're going to do that same thing 60 newton meters plus a quarter of a turn all right there we go we're all timed up i leave this zip tie on until i'm ready to put the upper timing cover on that way i don't have to worry about anything flopping or flapping around i'm gonna say one more time this is a tricky thing to do so if you struggle with it or don't get it on the first go around don't get frustrated don't feel bad i didn't get it on the first go around either it is rather tricky with these head gasket spacers just double check and make sure you follow everything exactly how it needs to be make sure you have the repair manual so you can reference and double check your torque specs all that kind of stuff is very very important if you want to see the rest of the engine assembly video i'll be sure to link that up now if you're timing one of these without a head gasket spacer i have a video for that too it's a little bit easier and less finicky for uh for error all right so with that i'm out have an awesome day and i'll talk to you next time and ready to get this thing put back together the whole way

Channel: HumbleMechanic

Views: 60,127

Keywords: vr6, humblemechanic, humble mechanic, vr6 timing chain, vr6 timing chain replacment, vr6 timing chain faliure, time an engine, retime an engine, install cams, replace vr6 cams, what is engine timing, how to properly time an engine, how to time a vr6, vr6 explained, road kill show, chrisfix, engine timing tips, replace timing chains, failed timing chains, engine timing, what is a timing chain, r32, VVT, headgasket spacer

Id: XN3z2gr01C4

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021