Some 2 and a half years after I first said I was going to do it, finally got round to doing the upgraded balance shaft and Hex key on my BRE engine last weekend there.
Would highly recommend the service offered by KMB Parts - they had the part out to me super fast, were just as quick at returning the deposit I paid when i returned my own shaft to them and were on hand throughout the process via both phone and email to offer advice and assistance.
As always seems to be the case when doing something new, there were some lessons learnt along the way so thought i'd chuck in my own learning points from doing this. Some have probably been covered already but i'm just putting them in from my own experience.
- read up on the matter first. Somehow I managed to overlook the fact that the engine needed to be at TDC before we rebuilt mine back up, which resulted in the timing being out. Not the end of the world and no damage done. But it did mean we did have to do the entire process twice as it needed stripped back down again and rebuilt. My fault entirely!!
- You'll need to drop the subframe to do this, which in itself isnt a particularly 'big' job - however it seems to be an absolute pain to try and get the subframe properly aligned again when rebuilding the thing back up. My steering is out a fair bit after rebuild. Will need to look in to this more.
- Dont service your air con if you're planning on doing this job any time soon. Whilst the job 'can' be done with the air con hose in place (which we did the first time), its a bit of a struggle to get the sump out with it in place. Second time we did it, we disconnected the air con pipe and the job was 100 times easier. I'm the fool who spent £55 on an air con service just a fortnight before doing this though!!
Overall, it wasnt the worst job in the world to do (its easy for me to say that given that 70% of the job was done by my mechanic mate right enough) and i'd suggest that anyone with a mechanical background should be able to take the job on with relative easy.
Upon inspecting my hex key when it came out, it didnt look all that bad in honesty, certainly no visible signs of wear. There was a little bit of play with the key inserted in to the shaft, but there was probably a fair bit of life left in it (i'm at 102k now). That said, I dont grudge the £300 odd its cost for peace of mind and it feels good now that I dont have to worry about it.
