Cam belt kit - seized engine!

cyclonebri1

Horizon81 wrote: »

Does anyone have any information on changing the cambelt on a 1.2 16v clio. My friend also has this model car and it's due a change but from ringing round speaking to several garages, it seems to be a particularly complicated job (compared to other makes anyway). Some garage refused the work, others would only let their most senior mechanic work on it!! Does it really need specialist knowledge and experience?

Clio's are a bit quirky in the diesel versions as the crank pulley is not keyed to the crank in anyway and it's very easy to allow the alignment to "stray". To be honest I'm not sure if this applies to the small petrol engine.

vindiesel34

Update 24th May 2011...... Nearly 6 weeks after having the components (belt & tensioner) sent away to check if faulty... i have news.....

Manfacturer of the cambelt kit claims there was no failure of parts, they are blaming fitting. Strange it took them 6 weeks to decide that!!! Dodgy springs to mind.

Garage who fitted cambelt kit argue there corner that hes fitted hundreds of these kits without a problem before and cant understand why it lasted nearly 7 months before the belt snapped...

I feel quite lucky (if lucky is the word!) the garage has agreed to pay half towards the cost of repair... Repair bill was just under £700.... £350 in cash was paid to me last week. Suppose im lucky to get anything back really as they could have refused to pay anything and a costly court battle would have done me no favours.

Typical.... i buy a second hand car... for peace of mind have the belt etc changed.. only for it to bite me up the ar*e... your damned if you do and damned if you dont!

cyclonebri1

Bang goes atrixinblues thoughts then,?

pendulum

vindiesel34 wrote: »

Repair bill was just under £700.... £350 in cash was paid to me last week. Suppose im lucky to get anything back really as they could have refused to pay anything and a costly court battle would have done me no favours.

I think that's a fair statement to make.

The garage seem to have been very reasonable here. You even said in a previous post they were co-operating well at the moment. I think it's a shame you didn't give them the opportunity to fix the car first which you should have done; it probably would have been a win-win situation for the both of you. The bill to fix would have been much less without the labour fee of the second garage added on.

Still, it's worked out ok in the end anyway. If the garage hadn't been a decent one, your quite right, you probably would have had a nightmare trying to get any money back, so £350 is a good result.