Timing belt Gates or Mitsuboshi

I bet if they had used a Mitsuboshi timing belt in the first place it would have lasted much longer.

The only thing I concerned was the timing belt itself. It was a US made MITSOBOSHI instead of Japan made one. But it was perfect fit, didn’t miss timing even by 1 teeth.

Gates makes the best timing belts.

I have the gates kevlar belt. It's great.

Had the timing belt replaced last year - didn't find a single crack on the old one despite it being 20 years old. Ditto for the serpentine belt. The dealer's head technician had told me that Mitsu's rubber quality is top notch - on par with Toyota, way better than Nissan's (his words). I didn't believe him until I saw the belts with my own eyes.

Just had a Gates one put on, no complaints here. One note to mention is that the water pump pulley seems to sometimes not seat on to the shaft perfectly. When mine got done I noticed that the pump pulley wobbled around excessively. The shop took it back, removed the belt, retorqued and all was good. The technician said that weird lining up with a pump pulley is a Honda thing, never knew that fiestas had that too.

I’ve always worked on Miata’s, but I’ve never used anything other than gates timing belt and water pumps. Only time I’ve had a gates timing belt fail on me was due to my own fault in which the belt was rubbing on the timing covers until it got caught and ripped a chunk out of it. Even without that chunk it still ran and drove fine while revving the engine 1000rpms past its intended revlimiter.

I've been using a Gates belt on my weekend toy for the past 5,000 hard, abusive miles with no catastrophic failure. I did have their water pump fail internally in under 1,000 miles. Replaced with Subaru OEM.

One this I did notice. Your belt is a gates t240, when I bought my truck the previous owner had that belt, and I found issues with it. The proper belt for mine is a gates T154. 154 being for 92 and earlier and 240 for 93 and up.

We put a fresh Gates one in the daughters 1.4MA and it whined like crazy despite the tension being spot on.