Ok, My brother and I are working on his '94 Honda Accord lx 4 door sedan. We are attempting to replace the timing belt and water pump, along with whatever need replacing while it is all torn down. We have the helms and a haynes manual-along with anything I have found here on the forums.
The reason we are doing this is because the water pump was leaking and progressively getting worse. We tore it down and replaced the cam seal, front balancer seal and the water pump. We had purchased the Gates timing belt kit from Oreilys and it came with the two belts and the balancer kit. We replaced all of the above mentioned and then started to work on putting the timing belts on. The gates kit actually came with pretty straight forward instructions that made sense after reading the helms and haynes manuals. This is where we ran into problems.
Before beginning the teardown, we made sure we had all our pullys lined up and the cam shaft at TDC as explained in the manuals.We put the belts on and after tightening the balancer with the 10 mm bolt we attempted to turn the crank shaft counter clock wise to tension the main belt. After beginning to turn the crankshaft we heard clicking and realized the water pump wasn't turning and that the timing belt was actually slipping on the pullys. Okay so we know more or less that we screwed up and stopped turning after we heard about 4 clicks. I read on the gates instructions that we were (maybe) supposed to set the tension on the timing belt first and then do the balancer belt? Does that sound right?
So we took off the belts and rotated the crank clockwise (a little bit, it was at11:00oclock and we moved it to 12:00)and aligned it with the the lower timing belt cover marks and then we rotated the cam shaft until we had the letters (UP) up and the inside marks (- -) aligned with the head, so we figured we had all the pullys lined up as if you had your timing belt breaks and you had to align all your pullys. We also did the rear balancer shaft? if that is what that is- it's the one where you take the bolt out and place a 1/4" extension in the hole after lining up the mark on the pully (at ~5'oclock position).
I hope I have explained this enough so everyone can understand. Is our thinking right as far as aligning all the pullys and setting the cam at TDC? Can any one explain if we need to do anything different? Please help if there is any input that can help us finish this project.
We did the timing belt on my 93 civic but didn't have to deal with the balancer bullsh*t. I don't remember it being that difficult.
Please help and thanks in advance...,

Elmerfudd

cliffnotes: attempted to tension the timing belt after replacing waterpump, seals and balancer, something definitely went wrong!!

 

PM/IM the info good luck and hopefully you dont find bent valves or a hole in a cycl.

for those that do their own work

 

did you put a bolt on the t-belt tensioner to hold it down?? if so remove it or t-belt cannot be adjusted