I have 2 issues:

I bought a brand new Gates tensioner assembly for my 03 S.
I also got the DT tensioner stop. When I took the damper off the tentioner assembly, I noticed that the damper is only "dampening" in 1 direction. If I pull on it, it comes out very fast, like it is not connected to anything, when pushed back in, it seems to work fine. Shouldn't it be working in both directions? It does the same thing if pull on it with a sharp jerk, nothing on extention, works fine on compression.

Is it defective?


2nd issue.
The reason I had to replace it, is I saw that I could not see the hole in the tab in the middle of the spring, and my belt was old, so I was going to replace it. Used the tensioner tool, released pressure, saw the hole, and put an allen key in the hole. When i released slowly, it never stopped... the whole tab had broken off the tensioner assembly, that was why I could not see the hole.

So... my issue is, how do I safely get the stupid assembly off the car, if I cannot contain the spring pressure??

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

 

If the belt is off, it's no biggie. Just remove the 4 bolts holding the tensioner. The spring pressure is already removed if the belt is off.

 

Are you sure? I have the belt off of all of the other components, but still between the crank pulley and the tensioner pulley(they are about 1mm apart, because the belt is keeping the pulleys from touching each other), and there is still a lot of force being pushed into the crank pulley from the spring on the tensioner...

Any ideas on the damper? do I need to send it back?

 

ok, the damper is fine, Way Motor Works helped me out and checked one they had, it is the same way, so the damper is fine.

I do not know how much pressure is still on the tensioner assembly, so I will have to unbolt slowly, and see what happens I guess

 

Is the 2nd hole on the tensioner tab missing in action. That's the one you use to compress the spring and r&r the drive belt. If it's missing just wear work gloves while you remove it carefully, there shouldn't be too much tension left.

Jeremy

 

I installed my damper with nothing compressing the spring, and took it off several times like that. No problems.

 

damper itself, would have come off easy, but I needed to remove the entire tensioner assembly.

I did get it off, it did have some power left in it, but it did not hit anything when it was released.

I got the new one in. Here it is before it went in. This was just part of my suspension adventure, detailed in another thread.