Timing belt Gates or OEM Volkswagen

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

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.

Glad you used lock tools. You could always reinstall tools to check. But if pin was in crank and bar installed hard to screw that one up for belt.

For my vehicle, a VW Tiguan 2018 2.0L 4Motion diesel SEL model, I opted to replace the timing/Axillary belts (due to a squeal noise) at 36,000 miles. As shown in the attached photographs, the timing and auxiliary belts were showing signs of wear.

I changed the original timing belt on my 2011 TDI Golf at 192,000 miles and the belt still looked good.

i have a blue gates belt on my m20, its a good belt

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.

I used a Gates belt that the marks were off last fall.

I've had gates belts do that in 20k.