OK, I buttoned up the engine tonight for what I hope is the last time. I thought I should put down some notes while thoughts are still fresh in my head. Also have a few questions for the advanced guys -- skip towards the end for those.

Executive summary: I thought that doing the TB job myself would save some money and insure it was done right. In retrospect, it saved no money at all (assuming a reasonable value per hour for my labor). It might actually have been a money-loser.

I also wanted to make sure that things got done right. Why? Because, just before starting the TB change, I drained the coolant and found that the radiator was half-plugged with mineral scale from tap water. Apparently, the last idiot to do a coolant service couldn't be bothered to comply with the very clear instructions in the owner's manual to use only "distilled or purified" water with the antifreeze.

Which idiot would that have been who made that mistake? Why, the one at the local Honda dealer service department, because they did the last coolant change on this car. If they can't correctly handle something that bone simple, how can I expect them to do on a job as complex as a belt change?

So I did the best, most cautious, most detailed job I know how to do, and I'm still not sure that I did everything right.

If someone with this particular model (a '94 Accord) asked me if they should try the job, I would tell them with NO HESITATION to take it to a professional wrench.

Why was the job such a bitch? Couple of reasons come to mind.

The first is that I chose the wrong manual for the job. I used a Haynes. I'm told that the Helms is better. I can't verify that personally, but I can verify that the Haynes manual fellates syphilitic goats. There are exploded diagrams that lack critical component placement, or get it wrong. There are tasks out of sequence. There are references to tables that don't exist.

The Helms book is more expensive, but hey, price your time. Even if someone works for minimum wage, a few wasted hours makes up the difference in price. I wasted many, many hours of headscratching and backtracking over the Haynes.

Another issue is this particular vehicle and its evil subtleties. Let me pick one at random. You have to unbolt the engine mount and lower the engine with a jack on the driver's side to take off the lower TB cover. OK, that's a hassle, but the engine mount absolutely has to be removed anyway, because the TB itself goes around the mount. (Haynes says: "...mount may need to be removed." Grrrrr. Has to be removed. There's a difference. Get it right.)

What isn't clear is that on the '94 Accord DX, if you have an A/C system, when you start to lower the engine, the compressor bracket will bop into the front crossmember and limit the vertical drop of the engine. And that means you won't have room to get the TB cover out.

Not even if you pull the radius bar (another thing Haynes omits). I cracked the TB cover as it came out after 45 minutes of wrestling with it. Fixed it with Black Max adhesive and then cracked it AGAIN on the way back in. I patched it in place -- no way was I going to take off the AC compressor for such a dumb thing.

Also, recall that this is one of the subset of Honda/Acura vehicles that have a balance shaft. More complexity, more components, more stuff to remember. It also means more things to get in the way of hands and tools. The space where the belt system lives is mouse-tight. Two belts (and two tensioners) in that space are tough. A motor without the balancer would be easier.

Another problem was that I went deeper into the engine than a timing belt job normally would go. I figured that I didn't want me or anyone else having to open this bloody thing up again for at least another 90K miles, so I replaced everything in sight with new OEM parts. That includes seals -- given that the balance shaft seals on these engines are known to be failure points which can and do kill entire motors. (Yep, I do have a retrofit seal retainer on that one, before anyone mentions it.) So I opted to do the cam seal, balance shaft seal and main seal.

Guess what? Three hours of work with four different seal pullers failed to take these out. If I had kept up I would have scratched a bore. I had to conduct further *major* disassembly to get to the far side of these three seals to push them out. If the little mofos had pull rings wired into their faces, it would have been a two-minute job, max. No such luck.

That gets you into the Chain Of Fools issue that happens when trying to take off particular bits on a Honda. Main seal needs to have the oil pump cover come off. That means you have to remove the oil pan. That means you have to unbolt and remove both a structural member and a large chunk of the exhaust (with the usual rusted shut bolts common under the car). Then at the far end of the oil pan, there are two nuts that are occluded by the flywheel cover. But to take off the flywheel cover, two MORE covers have to be unbolted. At this point you can be forgiven for going and loading up your shotgun -- whether to go hunting for scalps of Honda employees or just to decorate the garage ceiling with your own scalp is up to you.

Any competent service/maintenance engineer would have an instant convulsive hemorrhage and bleed out dead on the floor from looking at how this car is put together. It's pretty obvious that Honda, although they are excellent vehicle engineers in many ways, don't really spend much time thinking about service efficiency or component accessibility.

Did I mention that Honda dealers in the SF Bay Area aren't great on keeping small parts in stock? Things like an oil pump gasket or that odd bolt that got dropped and went missing, well, they are SPECIAL ORDER, usually two or three days to get hold of, and not especially cheap.

The last thing that is a bugger about the job is the crank pulley. Actually, it's not the last thing, it's the first, as all of the rest of this stuff depends on it. There are two problems with it.

One, if your pulley nut was put on either by the factory or a dealer, they probably torqued it to some Gojira monster number instead of the reasonable 180 ft-lb the spec calls for. On this one, a 250 ft-lb electric impact wrench was laughed at by the nut. The 450 ft-lb air impact wrench over at the corner garage was also laughed at by the nut. The SIX HUNDRED FOOT-POUND air impact wrench at the dealer service department took it off, after a good half minute of hammering, but they charged $25 for that. Again, imagined savings from home wrenching get eaten up fast.

Two, you need a tool to immobilize the pulley so the engine doesn't rotate while you torque the nut. There are several ways I have seen quoted for this: stick a big screwdriver in the ring gear of the flywheel, buy a Honda or Moroso pulley tool, or build your own tool out of modified plumbing adapters and pipe.

I think the flywheel trick is nuts -- this much torque could seriously break stuff. I figured I would save money by building my own tool from pipe, but when you count false starts and bad info on how to do it, and the difficulty of use of the clumsy result, it's not a saver.

If you are planning this job, buy or rent or borrow the correct tool. If not, you can borrow my pipe tool, and use it to hit yourself in the head while you tell yourself what a dumbass you are for trying shortcuts when you've been warned already.

Anyway, I finally reassembled everything, taking supreme care to verify all timing marks, and the car started up. Well, it didn't, actually -- a long forgotten security interlock came back to life, and I spent hours trying to figure out why the car was totally dead, but that at least is not Honda's fault, nor is it mine.

Once the annoying little security thing had been noticed and dealt with, the car started, but was very noisy (its driver said, "it sounds tinny and farty, like one of those riced Civics"). There were plenty of things wrong. First off, the exhaust that I'd had to take off wasn't quite tight enough. Fixed that. Still noisy.

Ignition timing was wildly wrong. I hadn't planned on having to pull out the timing light, since the job didn't involve unbolting the distributor. I totally forgot that I *had* unbolted the dist -- when I lifted out the camshaft assembly, to be able to push the effing cam seal out from the inside. Since I hadn't planned on that step, I didn't remember the tuning that has to follow.

Fixed that. Still noisy. Sounds like loose valves. Really rattling and tapping like mad. But I set those meticulously. But it still sounds like loose valves. Hmmmmm.

Only one way to be sure. Unbutton the valve cover and run some checks. Long wait for the engine to cool down. I grab the feeler gauges still sitting out on the bench. I doublecheck them against the label on the hood. Yep, these are the right feelers, the numbers match up.

Waitaminnit! No, they're NOT the right feelers! Which means I set the clearances incorrectly. Here's why. The Haynes book has everything in Flintstone units -- feet, pounds, furlongs -- including using inches for valve clearances. But the label on the hood has clearances listed in millimeters. So what I did was to take the number that should have been mm, and use feelers for that number, but dimensioned in inches. Ow.

I have the right feelers in the kit, and I redo the valves. There is no sign of damage to the rockers or valve stems that I can see. The spring retainers look spalled, but it turns out to be what I think are pooled dried oil drips -- the spots wipe away.

Reset all valves, retorque all locknuts, replace valve cover, start up, reverify distributor advance. Looks OK. Test drive. Car feels like it has proper torque and throttle response, but it also still sounds clicky and tappy compared to what it was.

I might be making the wrong comparison here. It seems like the valves were quieter before, but they were also drumhead tight. They hadn't been serviced or loosened since the 30K service, and that was many years ago. Maybe an Accord engine with correct valve spec should be a bit rattly. This is the only one I know of, so I might be coming to the wrong conclusion. Statistics 101: beware small sample sizes, especially samples of size one.

Still wonder. Is some of the clickiness from belt maladjustment? Should I retension the timing and balancer belts again?

Anyway, I will have the regular driver of the car live with it for a few days and see what she says.

Overall, I could do this job much faster now that I have suffered all the way through it and made every mistake imaginable (well, not every mistake -- I did get the cam and balance shaft timing right, and messing that up is the classic big mistake on this job).

But would I want to do it again? No way. It would be worth it to me to go have to earn enough pretax dollars to get enough post-tax dollars to pay a professional to do the work.

It's a pleasure to work on well-designed machinery. It was not a pleasure to do this job. Does this mean Hondas are poorly designed? For servicing timing belts, particularly on this model and year, yeah, that's just what it means.

I note that Honda are using timing chains in more and more models. They must be getting more pissed-off letters like the one I'm going to write tomorrow.