Cambelt kit help?

[bensaud]

11 years holy cow!

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[iammooks]

Looks in very good nick. Maybe that's why Seat say they should last 120k miles. But by that logic no cambelt should ever snap because no one waits that long, but they do.

It's a nightmare. You could easily look at mine and say that all the people who say they do theirs at 40,000 miles or four years have got it wrong, and could save themselves a few hundred pounds. Then you do a search and you hear horror stories about people who've had theirs go at 15,000 miles and their car is being scrapped.

The difficult thing is that most people seem to have or have heard a story about a cambelt snapping, but I'm not seeing as much on the conditions it happened in. Most garages have got a photo somewhere of a shredded belt which they'll roll out when they're recommending a change, but did that belt have 40,000 miles on it and was four years old, or was that some idiot who put 200,000 miles on theirs, never serviced their car and ragged the **** out of it at every opportunity?

 

[Zardoz]

Yeah, car manufacturers need to instal internal cameras

 

[bensaud]

Cambelt duration on my wife's R56 Mini is 10 years 140k miles! I changed it at 90k 6 years old. Waterpump was leaking and causing damage to the belt so I would never go by manufacturer, it doesn't take much to remove the cover and look at the condition of things

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[iammooks]

Cambelt duration on my wife's R56 Mini is 10 years 140k miles! I changed it at 90k 6 years old. Waterpump was leaking and causing damage to the belt so I would never go by manufacturer, it doesn't take much to remove the cover and look at the condition of things

Sounds to me that it's the water pump that causes most of the problems. Now that I know how straightforward it is to get the pipe out of the way and unclip the top cover, I'll be checking at least every six months.

The Mini sounds crazy - I know it would be great to have that long an interval, but that just means people are going to leave it and never bother checking. If you have no interest in cars other than getting from A to B, that's a recipe for disaster.

 

[bensaud]

It's not just Mini it runs the PSA Diesel which is fitted to Ford, Volvo, Peugeot, Chitroen, people follow the planned maintenance and loose engines at 60k, where I over maintain ours and it's nearly on 150k and still on the original turbo.
FYI BMW want about £650-700 to do the cambelt and the parts cost £100!. I definitely couldn't afford to own a Mini if I had to get a garage to repair it!

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