My beloved college car, a 2002 Mazda Protege, just tipped over 120k miles. It has been a good car and hasn’t needed much service other than two sets of shocks, a power steering pump, and routine maintenance (brakes, rotors, tires).
I decided to put on my big boy pants and tackle the timing belt myself. As with any project, I needed to do some research so I went to Advance Auto to find the Haynes manual for my car. Surprise Surprise, the manual didn’t exist. No problem, Mazda was owned by Ford so chances are, the 2.0 L FS-DE engine in my Protege, was probably used in another Ford vehicle. Further research on the FS-DE engine, showed that Ford used the same engine in its 1993 – 1997 Ford Probe of which Haynes did create a tear down manual. The instructions in the manual were for the most part very straight forward with exception for one critical step, installing the tensioner. When installing the tensioner, the tensioner spring has to be oriented in such a fashion that the bottom of the spring hooks from the backside of the tensioner and up onto the engine pin. The top of the tensioner spring hook, part of the spring that attaches to the engine pin, faces the front of the car. When installing the tensioner, make sure you hook the spring onto the tensioner first before attaching the tensioner to the engine block and torquing it down. Use an allen wrench to clock the tensioner forward enough to hook the top of the tensioner spring onto the engine pin. Torque specs are found in the Haynes manual. What I found helpful was not to completely torque down the tensioner before attaching the tensioner spring. Torque the tensioner down completely after attaching the tensioner spring.
In addition to reading the Haynes manual, I went through various forums including mazda247.com and the complete 6 part removal and installation instructions on youtube. Both of these references are great!
I bought a no name timing belt kit from eBay. The kit included an idler, tensioner, water pump, timing belt, cam seals, crank front seal, and valve cover gaskets. The entire kit was a mere $130. What a deal! … not
I wasted an entire afternoon trying to get the garbage belt on but no matter how I lined up the timing marks or how I adjusted the tensioner, my crankshaft sprocket would always be a half of a tooth off TDC. The belt was simply not right.
My guess is that the belt was too elastic. Regardless, I stepped away from the car for the night and bought a new timing belt, Gates T228 from Amazon. Amazon PRIME is awesome!
The Gates belt took a little bit more time to get on as it was less elastic than the garbage eBay timing belt. After some wrestling, everything lined up perfectly!
Other things to note:
1) The intake and exhaust cams have two timing marks on them, make sure you use the right ones. One way to tell is to line up the I and E on each respective cam
2) Another way to check your crankshaft sprocket for TDC is to partially install the lower timing belt cover and attach the drive pulley. The drive pulley and lower timing belt cover have timing marks which will help you identify how far forward or back you are from TDC.
3) DON’T REUSE the old tensioner spring, that small thing keeps the tension on the timing belt
4) Lisle 36880 DOHC locking tool WILL NOT work on this car, the locking tool is too big.
Getting back into it 