Harvey

I did a search and everyone just says thier noisy. Okay, some don't like noise. Who cares about noise. The real question I have about them is are they any better than a convential timing chain set, double roller or regular? Since not to many peple have used the gear driven setup, I guess it would be hard to find out if they last any longer than the chain. And what about timing chain cover modifications? I have a EWP and my car is a '95, so that parts covered.

Bottom line, performance speaking and excluding any noise and/or money issues, which is better?

Wayne

ulakovic22

Since you took out money and personal preference I would say a properly set up gear drive is better. No slack in the chain, or having to worry about it breaking. In theory it will give you better timing since you take out the "stretch" variable. To be the bad guy tho, for our cars a noisy gear drive has the potential to cause false knock and performance wise false knock isn't good.

SVThuh

The wost feature of the gear drives is that it directly translates vibrations from the crank to the cam which really kills your front cam bearing. The front cam bearing already sees a lot of abuse as far as side loading. The Geardrive's just seem to hammer them to pieces though.

You can get gear drives that are machined to be quiet or noisy, the quiet ones really are quite quiet, so I doubt there would be much false knock generated by these, probably as much as a set of roller rockers, so thats not much of an issue.

Will it be more accurate in the long run due to lack of stretch in the chain? Yes, but at what cost. If your tearing your motor down every couple years, then go for it, but for me its not worth the risk.

If you want a really trick setup, look into the Comp timing belt setups. Those things are really nice, and accurate!

96capricemgr

Gears can and do develop slop and a friend lost a big block to a set not that long ago something went wrong they began to thrust into the timing cover and sent metal through the bearings. Chains work quite well and IMO if you really feel a need to "upgrade" and are not worried about the cost look into makeing a belt work, it will not transmit harmonics like a geardrive will or even like a chain could and the tensioner will ensure even less "slack" than gears.

Harvey

All good information. I'll start looking into the belt setup.

I am going to do a cam probably next year sometime and figured while I had the chain off I was either going to replace it or upgrade to something better. Just looking for upgrade options. SVThuh, I looked up your post from back in April about the timing belt. Did you finnally get one and if so, how much and what all did you have to do to make it work?

Wayne

SVThuh

Never got it.. I think Im just going to go with a billet double roller setup and electric Water pump. I am still tossing around the idea of the belt, but I dont think that the cost is justified for most usages for the street.

I just got my motor back though, and I will be piecing the rest of it together, and the timing set will be one of the last things that I end up purchasing. Ask me in 6 months

If you want to check out my new motor though, pics are at http://64.81.235.236/motor

Let me know what you end up with. Either way though, you will probably need to switch to an electric WP no matter what the choice sans the LT4 ED setup.

OBE1 95Z28

The noise will also affect your knock sensor causing timing to be pulled.