Chains and there life

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Stocious

Stocious

Active Member
Joined
Jul 4, 2019
Messages
304
Location
Cork , Ireland
Car
2005 E200 1.8 kompressor
Out of frustration I have to post this, chains do not stretch, they wear incremental each individual link and pin resulting in a longer chain, ie. worn/loose, plus in some applications gears wear also contributing to the loose chain, please refrain from saying stretched and when being told diagnosis by mechanics stretched is not a word you should be hearing, worn is more appropriate, hope ye accept this as it is fact,
 
Well I accept at a stretch your submission that it is the gears and wear of the links that cause a loose chain,regardless of that, the solution no matter what terms you use are new gears and chains to solve the problem.
 
And a worn chain with longer pitch accelerates wear on the sprockets.

Question is how to reduce wear. It can't be eliminated but extended oil change intervals are a problem and perhaps the reason MB pulled back from 2 year servicing. Chains like clean oil so I've been changing every 5000 miles in an attempt to put off the M271 chain/sprocket problems. Oil is vastly cheaper than a wrecked engine.
 
I think perhaps we should stick to worn, there are worse things to stress about than symantics of a worn out item. Stretched or worn item, its at the end of its service life and needs reaplacing. Calm down... ;-)

I do not doubt what you say from one minute, but do you have anything to back up this statement as fact? Purely out of interest for myself I would like to know. I am always keen to find out why and how things fail so if you have any more details I would be grateful.
I am just interested to find out.. :)
 
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Stocious said:
Out of frustration I have to post this, chains do not stretch, they wear incremental each individual link and pin resulting in a longer chain, ie. worn/loose, plus in some applications gears wear also contributing to the loose chain, please refrain from saying stretched and when being told diagnosis by mechanics stretched is not a word you should be hearing, worn is more appropriate, hope ye accept this as it is fact,
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I get what you are saying but it seems a bit pedantic.
A worn chain is slightly longer than a new chain, hence the term 'stretched' -- it isn't actually stretched but each link has some wear which all adds up to the chain being slightly longer.

Now I suggest that your point would be better if you used the odd full stop and titled you post as 'Chains and their life'.
 
190 said:
And a worn chain with longer pitch accelerates wear on the sprockets.

Question is how to reduce wear. It can't be eliminated but extended oil change intervals are a problem and perhaps the reason MB pulled back from 2 year servicing. Chains like clean oil so I've been changing every 5000 miles in an attempt to put off the M271 chain/sprocket problems. Oil is vastly cheaper than a wrecked engine.
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That’s my tactic as well with my M271 , just hit 80k last week as well o_O
 
As a pedant myself I can understand your frustration. However, life is short and I’ve given up correcting people as I know they are walking away thinking “wonker”.
One that particularly grinds my gears is people saying “shock absorber” when they mean “damper”. I can still hear my old college lecturer Doug Wragg... “The spring absorbs the shock boy, the damper controls the oscillation of the spring”. I’ll get over myself one day!
 
W1ghty said:
That’s my tactic as well with my M271 , just hit 80k last week as well
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It's good news that you hit 80K without problems. Mine has only just turned 70K so I should get a few more years out of it yet. I wonder if anyone has exceeded 100K on an M271 with the original chain.
 
190 said:
It's good news that you hit 80K without problems. Mine has only just turned 70K so I should get a few more years out of it yet. I wonder if anyone has exceeded 100K on an M271 with the original chain.
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I would think they have ,it can’t affect all cars .
I took the rocker cover off the other year , maybe around 70k and looked at the sprockets , they all looked pretty good , so fingers crossed for a while .
I must admit I don’t feel like paying £1500 for replacements , that’s half the value of the car .
 
If the wear means it is longer, has it stretched?
 
If you want to be pedantic a chain runs on sprockets not gears. Whilst worn rollers and incorrect tensioning wears the teeth on the sprockets chains do actually stretch by up to about 3% , which can be measured by comparing a new to an old chain.I sold chain for thirty plus years and have seen many stretched ones. People often replace the chain without changing the sprockets , general school of thought is that sprockets usually have a life expectancy of two chains. Not always the case, but inspection of the sprockets will reveal any wear to the teeth as in a chain turning in a clockwise direction there will be a "rounding" of the profile on the left hand side of the teeth. The upside of chain versus belt drive is that you can generally hear the approaching "end of life" from a chain , rather than the nasty disintegration of valves meeting pistons.
 
Stocious said:
Out of frustration I have to post this, chains do not stretch, they wear incremental each individual link and pin resulting in a longer chain, ie. worn/loose, plus in some applications gears wear also contributing to the loose chain, please refrain from saying stretched and when being told diagnosis by mechanics stretched is not a word you should be hearing, worn is more appropriate, hope ye accept this as it is fact,
Click to expand...
What we used to do in the Sixties to prove a chain was worn is to hold it horizontal we never bothered about noise then.........a new chain would be almost straight but a worn one would curve away to the ground a fair bit maybe even 3" (75mm)
Of course then materials were much better than the quality today where obsolescence is built in to certain parts.
 
We just compared the size of the chain to a new one... if it was longer, it got replaced.
 
markjay said:
We just compared the size of the chain to a new one... if it was longer, it got replaced.
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In all fairness that is not really the way to see if a chain has worn as the adjuster takes up any slack but it can still be very worn with the correct adjustment?
 
KeithJG said:
In all fairness that is not really the way to see if a chain has worn as the adjuster takes up any slack but it can still be very worn with the correct adjustment?
Click to expand...

We did a lot of things differently back in the seventies..... :D
 
MB has a measurement tool which is put to tensioner place (AFAIK this is procedure both OM651 and OM642, I remember seeing both WIS documents...)
 
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