After investagating my wired sound a little more... I think the problem is the timing chain. Its a scratching sound coming from the harmonic balancer area but its not any of the pulleys, and it sounds like the sound a chain would make if it was loose and scraping aginst the cover. So mabey my chain tensioner is bad? The car has 120K miles... So I am not ruling anything out! I guess I need to pull the cover off.

 

The timing chain doesn't have a self tensioner system. However, it IS possible that the chain has stretched.

 

Have you tried the heater hose trick?

Have you done the simple and obvious; like take the belts off and see if it goes away?

If it's the chain against the cover, it will probably wear a hole in the lower right corner of the TC, and start spewing oil. If it gets to that point, you have less than an hour of run time before it stops altogether from the few remaining plastic teeth shearing off the chinesium cam gear.

 

Just how do the make Chinesium teeth, anyway

 

Oh... I feel dumb now. Hahaha.

Anyway, I will pull the cover off and see what I have. The car has 122,000 miles on it and I have known the car since it had just under 70,000. It has never had the chain replaced. Even if its not my problem, it wouldnt be a bad idea to replace it anyway. Where is the best/cheapest place to get a replacement?

 

Cheapest: local autoparts chain store (Autozone, Napa, and Parts America store)

Best: Speed shop that stocks higher end parts (Crane, Comp, Cloyes, etc.) or online like Summitracing.com and jegs.com.

 

Honestly, a cheap one is just fine, as long as it's US made.

Get the kind that looks like your stock chain; NOT a "roller" that's $20, or what they call a "truck chain". Those look sort of like rollers but they aren't. They have these weenie little bushings in them instead of rollers, and they elongate from wear (what people mistakenly call "stretch") worse than regular stock ones do.

But, they don't actually have chinesium teeth; they have phenolic dentures, made onto chinesium gums.

 

RB, your sense of humor never ceases to amaze me.