Hi All
Ok, well before I went through the motion of removing the belt and counting teeth (probably similar effect to sheep), I had one last go at ensuring the belt was correctly located. The difficulty (both to do and to see) is whether the belt is fully tensioned between the crank and the idler gear which drives the disti. I managed to do this by taking the belt off the idler at the front of the idler, so it only engaged at the rear (near the tensioner bearing) and moving the crank slightly to make sure the belt was tight. Obviously you have to revisit the position of the crank and idler to ensure they end up correctly aligned. Then it is easy to wrap around the front of the idler wheel and then around the tensioner and exhaust cam wheels, finally this left just a small amount of effort to go over the inlet cam wheel. Finally released the tensioner screw and as a check, turned the engine over by hand for a few times to ensure that the timing marks all aligned.
It will be a few weeks yet before I can fire up and see if all is ok.
One thing I did find, was there was no mention anywhere I could find of how to remove the tensioner bearing with the engine in situ.
Haynes tells you sort of with it out of the car, but could not see anything with it in, nor anything on this forum, so thought I would share my experience, it may help someone!
The tensioner bearing is located on a movable spring loaded plate which is held in place with one bolt and a stud. The bolt holds part of the spring and needs to be loosened off to allow the plate to move. The stud goes through the flange on the plate and through the centre of the tensioner bearing. The hole in the plate is much larger than the stud, allowing some movement of the plate as required. When in normal use, the nut on the stud is tightened up and fixes the plate in a specific position to tension the belt.
So, slacken off the tensioner nut and the bolt and you can now force the tensioner to release tension on the belt, lock off the nut again, then remove the belt. All well and good so far. Now to remove the bearing. Remove the nut and the three washers under it (varying sizes and the last one has a flange on it, keep them in the correct order for reassembly. It is now possible to ease the bearing off the flange of the plate, but it will foul the pulley of the water pump, so you have to get in with a spanner and slacken off the three bolts on the pulley. Not easy, but doable with patience. I suggest not removing them as they will be a pig to get back on due to the inner wing being in the way. You will have to wedge the pulley somehow to allow initial unscrewing of the bolts (and retightening). You can get in with a flat bladed screwdriver on the other bolts to provide some resistance or use some wood to wedge against the block etc, your choice. When the pulley is slackened off enough there is just enough room to slide the tensioner bearing out over the pulley and then over the stud, but it was very tight on mine.
Reassembly is a reverse of above, but when trying to put the tensioner bearing back on the flange of the plate I found it hard to get it to go on, so I put it on the flange slightly and then added the washers and the nut, starting with just one, tightening a little to push the bearing on and adding the rest as there was room on the stud. For the last flanged one I found it necessary to force the tensioner plate spring into compression to allow the washer to sit correctly against the tensioner bearing as the stud gets in the way when fully released.
That's it, fairly straight forward and whole thing should take 1-2 hours (if doing it for the second time), first time will take a while longer if you go down a few blind alleys like me.
Peter
