What you describe sounds exactly like my procedure, which I'm quite happy with, both in theory and in practice. The one additional thing you might want to worry about is that you should really drill a hole in the piston so that it no longer functions as such. I thought of this only after installing one of these on a car, and since that one worked I haven't bothered with it since, but it wouldn't be a bad idea. I'll paste my procedure (from a previous digest post) below:Can anyone comment on their experience? For a newly rebuilt 12V 3L, I've plugged the oil feed stud by drilling/tapping for a small set screw (but not the drain hole), used hi-temp, synthetic grease in the piston/bore/shaft area to keep this lubricated, and replaced o-rings, shaft bellows, and idler/bearing. Anything else to worry about?
In my not-so-humble opinion, the solution is to put new o-rings on the oil feed stud and the backing plate, tap threads (4 x .7mm) in the end of the stud, and plug it (you could just as easily fill it with JB Weld or solder, but I like the idea of being able to revert to stock in 2031 so I don't lose any concours points for a modified tensioner). You should probably also drill a hole in the piston, but you could make it threaded 4 x .7mm so when you need to revert to 100% stock, you can take your plug out of the stud and put it in the piston. I didn't bother drilling a hole in my piston, and I don't worry about it, though. What you're left with is a purely spring-based tensioner, which is pretty much ideal. I understand why Alfa did it the way they did it, but it was really overkill, and perhaps more importantly, had some drawbacks. Eliminating the oil feed gives you pretty much constant tension all the time, and it actually responds to thermal expansion directly (which it did all along--the added feature of the oil feed was that it would back off the tension at high RPM when the cams have more momentum--clever, but not worth the leaks, if you ask me). Given the failures we've all heard about with the mechanical tensioner, and the fact that the parts for this purely spring-based tensioner are already all there, I wouldn't think of doing anything else. (I used the Zat tensioner for 26,000 miles before I thought of this, and it worked, but it scared the hell out of me, in principle, and on one cold morning when I felt the belt tension, it felt like it was about to fall off!)
Joe Elliott '82 GTV-6 -- to be removed from alfa, see /bin/digest-subs.cgi or email "unsubscribe alfa" to majordomo@domain.elided