I've had some abnormal belt wear and noise on my '04 996. I replaced the belt with a factory part and it helped for about 15000 miles, then it was noisy again, only this time it was louder, more like a whirring noise that follows RPM's.

While on a drive yesterday, the bearing in the tensioner pulley literally fell apart. It bent the thrust washer and I managed to lose the retaining bolt after I took it off. Luckily, two very helpful Porsche club members stopped to assist. One of them literally blew his entire Saturday carting me back and forth to auto parts stores. Very cool. I wasn't able to find a suitable temporary pulley or replacemnt bearing at the local NAPA store. BTW, NAPA stores do have X-reference charts for tensioner pulleys by PN or dimensions.

I'm old school, and have a hard time replacing a $120 pulley because of a failed $10 bearing. I was able to find the replacement bearing, a 5202-2RS and was able to get it from a local bearing house (KYK brand, Japanese) for under $8. Bearing details: http://kykbrg.com/protop1.html

A local indy shop luckily had spare thrust washers and retaining bolts laying around and is going to press the bearing in for me tomorrow.

 

Has anybody replaced their tensioner pulley and have the extra left over mounting bits? I need the thrust washer, and it isn't available seperately, at least that I know of.

The pulleys on my 2004 996 all have the same part number stamped on them, but that part number doesn't match up with the dealer parts book part numbers for each of the 3 pulleys. Looks like the only difference is the mounting hardware that comes with each new pulley. Soooo...if you want to replace the pulley, you could probably buy the cheapest pulley of the 3, so long as you keep the original mounting bits.

Based on pulleys pulled from a junked early 996 engine, it looks like the earlier 996's use a slightly different pulley. Although it is the same depth and OD, and uses the same size bearing, the earlier pulley has a different rear offset and has no part number stamped on the face. Can anybody verify this?