Hello everyone, after changing the timing belt, along with water pump and pulleys, the timing belt appears to be running flush with the edge of cam sprockets, on the engine side. When I was putting all together, I put the belt where it was before, but after spinning the engine by hand, as suggested, to check the timing marks, it moved or slid as it is now, flush with sprockets, and water pump pulley inner edge, it doesn't seem to move any further than that. Before the replacement, belt was running almost right in the middle, as seen on the sprockets, where it left marks. I will upload some photos later, and maybe a video, because there is some kind of sound when the belt is running, I don't know if it's normal or not, it doesn't sound like it's rubbing somewhere. I used the Hepu water pump and Gates powergrip timing belt kit.

So is it normal for belt to be like this or not? Car seems to run fine.

 

Never used a gates belt so can't say if that's normal or not. But my guess is that more likely it's a pulley alignment issue. Did you replace the idler and tensioner pulleys? Maybe one of them's defective? Seen it before, but in my case the belt was riding outside edge of pulleys and wore a groove in the plastic cover.

 

Thanks for a reply. Yes, I replaced both of the pulleys along with timing belt. To fix this issue, first I tried changing the new tensioner pulley to the old one, but it didn't help. Then I removed the new water pump, applied some rtv on the new gasket, put it all back together, and still, nothing changed, issue remains. Now I am thinking to change the new idler pulley to the old one and see what it does. I hope that all this disassembling and assembling won't damage the hydraulic tensioner, it doesn't seem to leak oil now. I replaced the camshafts front seals too, but I think the camshafts sprockets are not causing this issue.