I'm helping my friend put his motor back together after the rebuild (hydro locked it, only bent one rod though) and we can't figure out how to get this thing back in place. We get everything together with it off, but when we turn the motor by hand, the belt keeps wanting to walk off the cam gears and everything else. We're thinking that the only thing causing this is that tensioner not being on.

As far as my questions go, one, is it possible to leave this thing completely off and get it all to work right and two, is there an alternative to the auto tensioner?

 

no - it must be in place in order for everything to work,
yes - the manual tensioner conversion must be done. Search.

 

If the belt comes off on its own, than you have a bent gear somewhere. The only thing the tensioner does is keep the timing belt from jumping teeth.

Your crank is probably bent, esp since you hydro locked the motor, and bent a rod.

 

how could you tell if the crank is bent? if it's not the crank, what else could it be?

 

Do you have the balance shaft pulley on the crank as you're spinning it?

 

no, it was still off

 

what we're running into now is that, with or without the balancer belt off, the timing belt walks off the cam gears when we turn it. we managed to get the tensioner back on.

 

how does the crank feel when you turn it by hand ? Is it smooth or are there spots where it appears to turn much easier?

sounds like somethings either assembled wrong or you have something rotating that failed and is no longer true.

 

when we put the pistons back on the rods, one of them wouldn't pivot. it seems to have loosened up a bit, but it really just depends on how hard we turn the motor. if we put a good amount of force on it, it goes pretty smooth, but if we go slow, it seems to get sort of hung up in a spot or two.

 

would we be ok if we replaced the H crank with a F22B2 crank?

 

i think the f22 crank is a few millimeters larger

 

h22=90.7mm (i think) stroke, f22=95mm stroke. ya gotta swap rods & get diff pistons

 

what we have right now are the h22a pistons, f22b2 rods and h22a crank. we're trying to figure out which crank we need to use that piston/rod combo.

 

If the F rods are the same length, run with the F crank. Thats essentially an H23VTEC. You'll need to get it tuned though, or you'll for sure blow it up quick fast and in a hurry.

 

he's got an h23 non-vtec and the h22a ecu's. neither of those will work? or what if we converted the h23 ecu to vtec? would that be fine?

 

No, you need a tunable ECU, the F22/H23 cranks have 5mm longer stroke.