Just watched an interesting video on Youtube showing the replacement of a camchain and oil belt on a 95k mile manual box Focus. The interesting bit for me was condition of the wet oil belt. It showed almost no signs of breaking up and the oil strainer was clean. There is no tensioner on the oil belt and it seems to lead a fairly stress free life. The camchain however had stretched and the tensioner was almost fully extended. The technician stated that after 90k, these engines do risk the chain jumping the sprockets so its worth getting the chain replaced early. I've got the same engine in my Puma and I'm never going to get near 90k miles so it has made me feel a bit better.

Thanks for sharing that @Vendee, that new Engine looks very similar to the 1.5 3 Cylinder Dragon one, the Oil Pump Belt also runs with no tension and the Chain setup looks the same.

With that car having done 90,000 miles in 3 or 4 years it must have been running hot most of the time so I'm not surprised that the Oil Pump Belt looked almost perfect. The Chain didn't look that bad, I'm not sure how much of that was wear and how much was the the initial stretch.

Hi @Vendee, nice video with quite a lot of interesting information.

My take is that in fact that chain had minimal wear after 90k miles. At least this is what I see when the new and old chains are put together side by side. What I missed is the wear on the chain guides. That tensioner could be extended so much because the chain caused wear on those.

The pump belt is in fact no surprise. I haven't read of any non tensioned pump belts wearing out. Plenty of autos though.

What I find more interesting is that he is using the same bolts on the timing chain cover and doesn't seem (or he doesn't say) how he is tightening those. I remember there is a sequence with several stages, and that new bolts should be used. I always wondered why and if that is really necessary, since the cover is aluminium and the rtv gasket takes care of the imperfections. I thought tightening the cover to a decent torque would be enough and no angle tightening would be needed.

All in all, it looks like this revised ecoboost engine is quite better than the older ones, so it gives me some piece of mind.

1 hour ago, RaduF86 said:

What I find more interesting is that he is using the same bolts on the timing chain cover and doesn't seem (or he doesn't say) how he is tightening those. I remember there is a sequence with several stages, and that new bolts should be used.

My understanding too.