I changed a former coworker's timing belt and water pump on his 92 Legacy today. His water pump gasket was leaking randomly and substantially. I knew it was gonna take me a while, since I packed the tools I thought I'd need into a bag and headed to his house. But I sure didn't think it was gonna take about 6 hours!
I took everything out of course, radiator, belts, crank pulley (bolt was WAAAY too loose for my liking), timing covers, etc. Everything was going smoothly until I got to the tensioner. First off I noticed that it wasn't pushed against the pulley before it was bolted down, like it should have been. But anyway, I unbolted the tensioner so it expanded (won't ever do it that hastily again) and then found that whatever behemoth buffoon put the tensioner pulley back on tightened the bolt so hard that it was already rounded off. I tried getting it out, but it was a lost cause of course. Tried pliers, vise grips, Robo-Grip, everything. It later occurred to me that I didn't have to remove that pulley to change the belt
, but as I took the tensioner out, I noticed that the hole in the tensioner body that you put the pin through was broken out. So that tensioner was useless as far as I was concerned. So I had to run the poor guy down to the Subaru dealer and make him buy a $100 tensioner (dealers are rip-offs here 
) so I could finish the job. I will say that the car runs a hell of a lot better now, probably coz of the new belt and the properly installed tensioner. Now I'm no Subaru master tech, but for God's sake, some of this stuff is so obvious! How can someone screw it up so bad? These mechanics are supposed to be certified and they have a reputation to uphold. I'm just a 20-year-old kid who has a bag of tools and a completely unfounded claim that I can do stuff like that. Why did I do the better job?
