Belt & braces

PART TWO: As our new project has no service history, a new cambelt is top of the jobs list. Andrew Everett assesses the damage.

Buying a car with a cambelt and no service history is pretty risky, so it’s essential to change the belt straight away. There are countless stories of “I’ll get it done next week”, in which time the belt has shed its teeth (they rarely snap), valves hit pistons, things break and the car is either a write-off or facing a massive repair bill.

Luckily, our Golf GTI had all the hallmarks of a car that had been maintained in its life, and as the cambelt requires changing every 60,000 miles and our car had 108,000 on the clock, there was no way it was on the original. We suspected the belt had last been changed sometime around 2012. So for peace of mind we decided to get it renewed.

The belt job

The cambelt on a Golf GTI is pretty simple. Volkswagen resisted the temptation to make the job stupidly complex like some manufacturers – the trickiest part is detaching the driver’s side engine mounting bracket. The crank and cam sprockets run on keyways and no locking tools are required. There are highly visible marks on them, and the belt tension is easy to set. Not only that, there is only one camshaft pulley/sprocket, so the belt runs around the crank sprocket, the water pump, the cam pulley and then the tensioner – it’s as simple as that. We got our replacement belt from GSF Car Parts – a Dayco cambelt kit and an INA water pump. The engine was bone-dry externally, so no new oil seals were needed and it took Parkside Garage around three hours to do the job.