Has anyone tried Mike Hamilton\'s Manual Tensioner?

I dug up this old post where he and Peter Meier see pretty enthused about it. I have an old one here that I was thinking about converting to save some money, but does anyone have any thoughts regarding reliability?

Ghislain I noticed you were looking into it back then too, what did you conclude?

I guess the first bit of peace of mind is that my search didn't turn up anything negative about them.

** Thought I'd change the title in honour of the old post **

That was a while ago.

I made one but never install it on a car. I through it out.

Would I install one on a Car??? No, just because it has not been proven and the consequence of a failure would mean busted Valves...

Ghislain.

Is Mike the only one that you've ever heard running one? And for that matter do you know if it held up for him?

It'd be hard enough for the bolt to back out, let alone if you coated it in high temp heavy loctite. I think I'd be willing to give it a go, as least if no one's had one fail on them yet.

Does anyone know if there's any way to get in touch with Mike Hamilton now, just to see how it worked out for him?

It has been a while since we heard of him.

Is there an e-mail addy on his site??? If so you could drop him a line.

Ghislain.

You REALLY don't have much to gain.

However, you have an engine to lose.

A new tensioner is $100 an engine is worth.....

I get what you guys are saying, I was just impressed with the ingenuity behind it, plus I got the feeling that Mike had more faith in these than the stock pressurized units since a couple of them failed? There's just no info on them since we're all rightly scared to try it.

On the other hand, I have to ask myself why they wouldn't have just designed a solid piece in the first place.

I think the stock one also act as a damper.

Ghislain.

A fellow dsm'er that is quite cometative in the drag racing field runs a manual tensioner. Made it himself, and swears by it. This is maybe more practical for a track car because he is always checking the tensioner.

A local DSMer also made one. Put it on with all confidence. Lost his engine after a single turn around the block with it. That was it for him.

A local guy here does that with his tensioners - of course I told him that I'd buy a new tensioner when we did the T-Belt on my Eclipse though...

That's scary, do you know why it failed so quickly?

** 'do', not 'so' **

No, I don't. But the guy doing it was no dummy.

Is'nt the hydralic tensioner design to compensate for the belt stretching after time? If so the manual tension would not be able to unless it was checked every so often.

Remember when you were a kid and you snuck off to the furnace room while her parents were upstairs ? Then the damn furnace would turn on and the squealing of the belt would scare you right out of her pants as there was no automatic tensioner only a fixed idler for the belt .

Well that's what your timing belt is going to do if you 'fix' the tensioner. As the internal spring weakens the hydraulic plunger compresses the spring keeping it at the proper tension. Overiding it, as the spring weakens over time you'll be replacing more than timing belt teeth.

For the 91

MD129355 Pulley, timing belt tens $ 36.39
MD164533 Adjuster, timingbelt te $112.44

And of course all the other parts if you're doing the timing belt.

Cheers Tony

What a great analogy

I actually thought about doing this once but making the tensioner spring loaded rather than fixed. This would account for belt stretch. A properly designed spring loaded system should last a lifetime - just think about the beating your valve springs take.
Unfortunately, this project would require substantial modification of the tensioner unit (to hold the new spring and plunger), tooling up a custom spring with the proper range and spring constant, and of course, the dreaded testing phase. In the end, as many pointed out the risk wasn't worth the reward.
JT

Then why do you think the factory uses a hydraulic piece?... I think there's a case where a spring alone won't work.

First of all you can't use a very heavy spring, because that means you can't put much preload on it without overtensioning the belt, so you won't get any range of expansion from it to take up the slack.

If your spring is soft enough to have enough travel, there might be a case where you get belt slap, and if that matches the natural frequency of the spring you can presumably get enough slap to skip the belt. And thaat ain't cool... I'm not saying this will happen for sure. But it's likely to happen somewhere in the rev range of an engine, and I'm pretty sure this is the reason for hydraulic dampening.

I beleive the tensioner is like nitrogen cylenders we use at work. No matter how much travel in the tensioner piston, the pressure is always the same.

In a spring, the more it is compressed, the more pressure it takes to compress it even more or vise versa.

It was designed this way to keep a constant tension on the belt, no matter how much it stretched, untill the cylender is worn or leaks and no longer can provide sufficiant pressure, no matter where the piston is in the tensioner cylender.

Good points guys, this is definitely the kind of info I was looking for.

I hadn't thought of the tensioner as being a consistent regulator so-to-speak; I figured it was mainly used to account for belt stretch over time which could be managed by checking the manual tensioner, although still pretty risky.

The manual tensioner will work if adjusted often enough, and adjusted properly.

The spring idea might not work at all because of the constant pressure + harmonics problem.

yes manual tensioner that is checked when you check your oil before starting car is good.

Manual tensioner without checkups = death