Hi all. I'm replacing the TB in my son's '96 2.3l equipped Ranger... Got the dampener off last night, rotated the crank shaft to line up the timing mark on the cover ( with the cam sprocket "triangles" lined up and no.1 cylinder at TDC on the compression stroke) and am ready to put the belt back in. All the relevant threads on this (and other sites) say to line up the embossed "diamond" on the front of the block with the same mark on the inner face of the oil pump/distributor drive sprocket. I see the diamond mark on the block , but their appears to be no such mark on my sprocket (possibly it was worn off by the old belt ?). However, there is an indentation formed on the inner face of this sprocket. Is this the "mark" to use ?

Also, since there is no actual distributor driveshaft on this electronically-controlled engine (I assume the ignition control module uses the driveshaft position sensor and toothed wheel presssed onto the back of the dampener for this purpose), does it really matter whether the oil pump sprocket is "aligned" or not ?

 

mine wasn't marked with yellow but it did have a lob on the inside of the sprocket, not really that noticeable, and yea the crank sensor reads the vanes on the inside of the crank pully and thats how it knows to spark, mine wasn't in time with the cam sprocket when i took mine off to fix the crank sensor though found out i spun a bearing.

 

shows how much i know, didnt even know my old 99 had a timing belt lol ... sold it at 140k (bought at 90)

 

haha, its one of those things that i thought they were always chain, then i found out mine was a belt, i was like what the **** that gay, its kinda like how i all EFI engines had coil packs, and i got my 92 3.0 and found out i had a distributer lol