To whoever the asshole was that did the last timing belt replacement on this car: I hope you rot in hell

There's a certain amount of, for lack of a better word, forensics that goes on whenever we work on this car. It's over twenty years old and it's not exactly low maintenance. It has had four or five previous owners, at least some of whom did their own work, and it's not an easy car to work on by any stretch. So every time we open the hood, we play a game well known to software engineers called "Where are the bodies buried?"

Yesterday there were a lot of them.

We decided to replace the timing belt after we tried to do compression test and discovered that not only was the timing horrifically misadjusted, we couldn't correct it. We would get close, and then cogs would slip because there was so much slack in the belt. We never bothered to put the engine back together after the first compression test so we figured it wouldn't be too hard to continue taking pieces off, get to the timing belt, and put it all back together.

Well, I didn't think it would be that hard. If the BF had other thoughts, he kept them to himself.

1991 Mitsubishi 3000GT VR-4 Timing Belt Change Statistics

Start time	2:00 PM
Stop time	4:00 AM
Belts replaced	Timing, Power Steering, Alternator
Weight Shed	.5 lb - part of the air conditioning pulley
Fluids Replaced	Coolant
Fluids spilled all over the engine, the engine jack, the drop cloth, the floor, the people doing the work	Coolant
New spider webs built from car to ground during work, total	1
Mosquitoes squished, total	10, approx.
List of atrocities committed by previous owners and/or mechanics	See list, below
	engine bracket bolts not tightened
	engine mount bolts not tightened
	existing timing tensioner not adjusted
	existing timing belt not tight
Front Bank PSI before timing belt change, average	181
Rear Bank PSI before timing belt change, average	90
Front Bank PSI after timing belt change, average	165
Rear Bank PSI after timing belt change, average	163
PSI range across all cylinders before timing belt change	90
PSI range across all cylinders after timing belt change	10

We spent fourteen hours yesterday to get to this point. That's not a typo. The car was already partially apart for previous compression tests and we still have four to six hours of work left to get it back together. I took a bath in coolant. For a while it was looking like I'd have to Gojo my hair. 

This is what I looked like after about six hours:

If you are guests of ours and you always wondered why we send you to the bathroom at the end of the hall rather than the close one right next to the front door, this is why. We use the close one to clean up messes like the one in this photo.

But this is the only photo that matters:

Compression test results: EXCELLENT. Conclusion: ENGINE NOT AT ALL RUINED.

P.S. That bottle of Pink Soap in the first photo is for cleaning oil painting brushes. I use it to clean myself up after car work because it's not full of grit and it's a lot gentler and more effective than Gojo. And it doesn't smell like oranges. Yesterday I showered with it. I was that dirty.

More timing

First, the scope of the work. We have a spreadsheet to keep track of what we need to do. It looks like this:

As you can see, we have some work to do. 

When we last left our heroes, they (we) had just performed a compression test with less than stellar results. Then we had a bunch of weddings to go to and we didn't get time to work on the car for a while. But we finally got a few free hours to try to work out the timing and perform a new compression test.

The problem with compression tests is that they're worthless if the engine timing is off. You're not going to get much compression if valves are open when you don't expect them to be. So step one was fixing the timing.

This involved shimmying a piece of cardboard a cam shaft gear and the timing belt, sliding the gear into correct timing, and removing the cardboard. This had to be done for 3 gears. It took a while.

And then it didn't work.

We've suspected for a while that something is wrong with the timing belt tensioner. The tensioning changes when we turn the engine over a few times (slack moves to various different parts of the belt) and the belt jumps teeth at the lightest touch. When we adjusted one cam shaft gear, others slipped. We couldn't keep one gear in time long enough to fix the others, and even when we got close, we still didn't really know if we were at all in time with the cam shaft that drives the pistons.

So now we've spent a week getting endless boxes of parts, and before we do anything else we're going to replace the timing belt and all that goes with it -- tensioner, water pump, and anything else we can think of. 

Then, maybe we'll get a worthwhile compression test.