A rattle from the front of the engine for a few seconds after a cold start, or a garage that has said “timing chain” and put a large number after it, is where most people arrive at this page. Before any of that is quoted, the complaint gets confirmed. A chain job can’t be priced honestly off a registration and a postcode, because until the noise has been traced nobody actually knows whether the chain is the fault.
We’re an independent workshop on the Medway City Estate in Rochester, a short run from Chatham. Nothing is started without your approval, and you’ll have the figure and what it covers before anyone picks up a spanner.
Chains very rarely snap out of nowhere. What happens first is that the plastic guides wear thin, the hydraulic tensioner runs out of travel and stops taking up the slack, and the chain gains enough length that the camshafts no longer sit exactly where the engine control unit expects them relative to the crank. The ECU compares those two signals constantly. Once they drift far enough apart it stores a correlation fault, and depending on how far it has gone you get limp mode, a rougher idle, hesitation, or a car that cranks and won’t fire.
The cold-start noise has a reason behind it too. Overnight the oil drains back down and the tensioner loses its pressure, so for the first few seconds a stretched chain is free to slap against what’s left of its guides until oil pressure builds and takes the slack up. That’s why it quietens after a few seconds, and it’s why people put it off.
None of those symptoms prove the chain on their own. A cam sensor, its wiring, a fuelling fault or an oil pressure problem will all give you much the same picture, and we’re not going to sign off a strip-down on the strength of a code somebody read out in a car park. Our diagnostic is £69. That buys stored and pending fault codes, the freeze-frame data captured at the moment the fault set, and live data with the cam and crank signals watched while the engine runs, rather than a guess made with the bonnet shut.
Where the work is then booked in, that £69 is usually credited against the repair. It’s job dependent rather than automatic, and on smaller jobs it isn’t, so it’s decided case by case and made clear to you before you commit to anything.
A chain and its tensioner live on oil pressure, which is why the oil condition gets checked as part of diagnosing chain noise rather than afterwards. Most of the work through this workshop is Ford, Peugeot and Citroen, and the reason is a shared design: Ford’s 1.0 EcoBoost and PSA’s 1.2 PureTech both run a cambelt in oil. That belt degrades with age and sheds material into the sump, and the debris finds the oil pickup.
Starve a tensioner of oil and you get a rattle that sounds exactly like a worn chain on an engine whose timing component was never a chain. On genuinely chain-driven engines, a partly blocked pickup wears a chain out early and will happily do the same to a brand new one. Fitting a chain kit to an engine with a restricted pickup is paying for the job twice, so we establish the oil side before anyone commits to parts.
Whether your engine is chain-driven, belt-driven or runs a belt in oil is settled by the engine, not by the badge on the boot. Cars sold under the same model name in different years can differ, so the engine is identified before anything gets booked in rather than assumed from the reg.
If it turns out to be a belt in oil, that’s a different job with a different price and we cover it in full on our wet belt page, and there’s a blog post here that walks through the difference between a timing belt and a timing chain if you want the longer explanation.
Most of what you pay on this repair is access rather than parts. On some engines the front cover comes off with the engine still in the car; on others the engine has to come out or be dropped far enough to get at the timing end, and that difference is the single biggest factor in the figure. It’s why a price quoted before anyone has looked at the engine isn’t worth much.
Scope is the other half. A chain on its own is one job; chain, guides, tensioner and sprockets together is another, and if debris has been through the oil, a new pump or pickup may need to go in at the same time. With the front of the engine already apart, replacing worn parts then is far cheaper than going back in later. You get the price in full, itemised, after the engine has been assessed and before work starts.
People ask about mobile and at-home chain work, and the honest answer is no. The car needs to be on a lift with the engine supported, the timing marks set and then verified before it’s turned over, and the oil system clean before it runs again. None of that can be done properly at a kerb in Chatham, and a chain fitted a tooth out does more damage than the worn one it replaced.
The real reason people ask is usually that they can’t get the car to a garage at all. That’s a transport problem rather than a repair problem, and it’s solved by bringing the car in on the back of a truck.
The workshop is on the Medway City Estate in Rochester, just off the A289, so for most Chatham drivers it’s a short run across the river rather than a day out. We see cars from Gillingham, Rainham, Rochester and Strood on the same basis, and Gravesend drivers come across on the A2 and pick up the A289.
If the car won’t turn over, is stuck in limp mode or has been sat on a driveway for months, we have our own recovery truck and will bring it in. That’s equipment we own, not a haulier we ring round for, which matters when a chain has jumped and the engine won’t crank at all.
We give the figure after the engine has been looked at, not before. The cost is driven mainly by access: whether the front cover comes off with the engine in the car or the engine has to come out, and whether guides, tensioner, sprockets and a new oil pump or pickup go in alongside the chain. The one number we can quote up front is the £69 diagnostic, and you'll have the full price, itemised, before any work begins.
It's a strip-down job on a lift with the engine supported and the timing marks set and verified, so it isn't a quick one. How long depends entirely on how the timing end of that particular engine is reached, which varies enormously between engines. We give you a time along with the quote for your specific car rather than a general figure that would be wrong for half the vehicles we see.
No, and we'd be wary of anyone offering it. The car needs to be on a lift, the engine supported, the timing verified before it's turned over and the oil system clean before it runs. If the problem is that you can't get the car to us, we'll come and collect it on our own recovery truck instead.
Not necessarily. A worn chain rattles from cold because the oil has drained back and the tensioner hasn't pressurised yet, but a tensioner starved of oil by a blocked pickup makes much the same noise, and so can a cam sensor or wiring fault causing a timing complaint. The £69 diagnostic covers fault codes, freeze-frame and live cam and crank signals, and the oil condition gets checked alongside it.
We identify it from the engine rather than the model name, because cars badged the same way can differ between years. It matters, because Ford's 1.0 EcoBoost and PSA's 1.2 PureTech run a belt in oil that sheds debris into the oil pickup and produces chain-like noise. That's a different repair, covered on our wet belt page.
Yes, we'll bring it in on our own recovery truck whether it cranks or not. Once it's here we establish compression and what the internal damage is before talking about parts, because a jumped chain can let valves and pistons meet. If the repair costs more than the car is worth, we'll tell you that straight.
Phone: 01634 510 780
Email: bookings@medwayvehicleservices.
co.uk
Unit 3 Cliffe Yard, Anthonys Way, Medway City Estate, Rochester, Kent, ME2 4DY
