Leaderboard

You can also make one with a couple round, metal electrical box covers and an assortment of bolts and nuts. I did this by using my cam sprocket as a template for the holes. It worked pretty good. The FSM says the torque on the tensioner bolts should be 13-15 ft. lbs, FWIW.

Clamps help a tremendous amount to hold the tension as you release the spring tensioner. That way nothing shifts. Clamp the belt in place first so you don’t need three hands or more. Makes it much easier.

if you have a spare cam cog, you can make an adapter pretty easily. I used an old short bolt with 17mm nut/head and tightened it in the centre hole. I fitted 4 M6 bolts to each of the holes so if cam cog was mounted on a cam shaft , the stud part would face forward. I mate the two flat faces together, aligning studs and use a 17mm socket on a wrench to tension up the belts. Unfortunately standard torque wrenches do not work or should not be made to torque the other way to tighten up right hand threads. If you have a torque wrench that is meant to work both ways - all well and good - you can get correct tension on belts. No pic as I believe I have run out of photo credit in here, and, I pinch the cam wheel to weld to a lawn/ground coring tool I made of same diameter. I drive the corer with the 17mm end of my cross bar wheel brace . It was all I had at the time ha ha

I put tension on the cam to pull the belt tight - and then button it all up while keeping the belt tight. Maybe it’s routing or where I check it or apples to oranges but the passengers side seems like it’s usually looser than the drivers side.

Yeah, I didn't experience anything sounding like a knock. But I'm glad I caught it before it got worse and while it was easy to repair. Took like 15 minutes with the motor on the stand. The oil leak turned out to be a lose cam cap bolt. I guess I missed that one. Torqued that one up and double checked the adjacent bolt, and no more leaks or other issues to report. Been using the car more and more around town, no hiccups. Hoping that the broken belt and bent valves will soon become a distant memory.

As someone who has had intimate knowledge with this engine, I would say its a poor choice. Questionable reliability even in stock form. As mentioned above, if it overheats the least it will do is blow the headgaskets. Worse case - crack the head(s). I ran a turbo from a WRX (TD04) for a while, until I blew the ring lands off a piston. If there was a decent engine management system for these engines (not cheap for any of them), it might make a difference. You will have better results with the next gen of engines - the EJ22 from early Legacys and Imprezas. Even the NA version can be turboed with low boost and there are cheaper engine management systems available. The EJ22 is non interference and basically bullet proof and you can find lots of them in wrecking yards

But but, The gen two is only 39 years old. lol