My timing belt snapped by my own stupidity. Razz and laugh if you will, I'm kewl with that. Oh and it's a SOHC d series motor.

The valve clearances seemed to check out as good so I am wondering is there a position I can put the cam in that all valves will clear?

If there is can someone tell me what it is?

There is no timing belt to keep the cam in sync with the crank at the moment.

I don't want to bend a valve or two if none are bent if the crank spins when I'm trying to break free the crank pulley bolt.

No one is offering help on the 92-00 section for some reason. Maybe they are laughing too hard to type.

 

I'm really not sure if this is 100% correct but my findings today seem to show that if the cam is in any of the TDC positions for the cam, then all pistons will clear all the valves.

It seems like the valves will kiss when the cam is half way between TDC positions.

At least this seems to be the case with the D15B7 motor. Other motors maybe different.

 

I'm confused on what you're trying to accomplish... You want to put the engine at TDC to take off the crank pulley?

 

No, as the title says, my timing belt snapped so there is no timing belt. So the cam and the crank won't turn synchronously.

So my concern was when I was fighting with the pulley bolt, if anything slipped and the crank went spinning, where is the safe position on the cam to make sure none of the valves were hit.

Interestingly enough, when I put the cam into any one of the 4 TDC positions for the cam, none of the pistons appeared to make contact with any of the valves.

 

There is no "safe" position, if the crank turns enough, contact will be made...

Your Google search found this.... https://www.google.ca/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=...es+SOHC+engine 94

 

Takes a ton of force to bend the valves,not likely to do it by hand even, if you hit them. Turn the crank to the TDC mark. On your way there, you will hit a stopping point and wont be able to turn anymore,you are hitting the valves. Back the crank off a little and the turn the cam towards its TDC mark. Do this from one to the other until both cam and crank eventually reach there respective marks at TDC then proceed as you normally would...

 

I actually didn't have any issues whatsoever with the pistons and valves as long as the cam was in one of the 4 tdc locations (12 o'clock, 3 o'clock, 6 o'clock and 9 o'clock).

The cam had actually stopped at 12 oclock when the belt broke and I had tried turning it over a time or two when it first happened. No funny sounds except the flat sound of no compression (valves partly open) as I cranked.

Then when I was testing all the cylinders with a leak down test and low pressure seal test, I never had issues spinning the crank. Nor did the low pressure have any issue of bottoming out the piston on the cylinder.

Granted I could have been bouncing on each side of the cycle of the unclear valve each time, but I managed to never touch any of the valves even with multiple attempts at turning the motor over without the belt before I knew it was the belt.

This is why I suspect the critical timing is when the cam is half way in between one of those 4 positions. I really don't want to experiment to find out, and I'm pretty happy I didn't have problems when testing everything.

One other trick that can be done is you can put the crank 90 degrees from TDC and the pistons are all at half and you can spin the cam all you want.

Also of note, this is on a D15B7 which has the valve reliefs in the piston tops. This very well could be why I didn't touch any of the valves as long as the cam was in one of the 4 positions.

Anyways, car is back together with a new crank seal and timing belt and all is well. My torque multiplier finally got to see it's first use and it worked well to pop that pulley bolt free.

 

only way to be sure the cam is in safe position to turn the engine over is to back off the cam caps so that no valves are down. you can also back off the adjusters but they may not have enough movement so it is usually easier to just back off the cam caps.

 

Yeah, my original plan of attack was to pull the rocker arm assembly off, but I really did not want to re hondabond the lower tower seals as I had just sealed them up again after doing the valve seals.

I am really fortunate that the design of the D15B7 gives a bit more clearance over other Honda motors. If it had been another motor, I would have been pulling the head to fix a bent valve or two as I was in gear when the belt snapped and quit on me cruising around 30 mph or so.