Timing marks

[Peter Palmer]

This is just a post fore a bit of personal info really.

I've just done a cam belt change after reading/following various guides and videos and everything went fine and its back up an running without any dramas. I locked three things, the crank, cam and diesel pump. But my question is why does the pump need locking? fair enough in older diesel engines the pump distributed the diesel to each cylinder injector so it fired mechanically at the correct time but with these common rail engines the injection is all done electronically and I was under the impression that the pump was just spun up to generate the pressure.

Incidentally the timing hole on the pump was different to the videos I watched, the videos showed the peg through the inside of the sprocket but on mine the locating hole was on the outside of it through a kind of back plate C shaped sort of hole that had quite a bit of movement in it, it is the 8 valve engine though.

[cancunia]

I thought the same as you about the pump and had read in a Haynes Manual that the diesel pump does not need to be locked for timing on the HDi engines, but I locked mine just in case. I think that perhaps the less things that can move the better. I can't remember how the locking pins worked on mine.