Hi. I thought I'd post the details of the problem I had recently and the fix. When starting the car I got nasty periodic grinding/knocking noise followed by some smoke from the drivers side of the engine bay. This noise then disappeared for a day before coming back with a vengance. This turned out to the crankshaft pulley (aka. harmonic balancer) that drives the aux belt. A new part is about £350 (only available from Honda) while a 2nd hand part is about £100. The new redesigned shorter aux belt was about £45.
The pulley has metal on the inside and outside with rubber sandwiched in between. The rubber disintegrated allowing metal bits to hit/grind off each other.
Apparently the Honda breakers yard said it was a common fault and they keep them on the shelf. There was some mention on this forum of it being a common problem in Poland but no-one from the UK seemed to know anything about it.
The pulley has metal on the inside and outside with rubber sandwiched in between. The rubber disintegrated allowing metal bits to hit/grind off each other.
Apparently the Honda breakers yard said it was a common fault and they keep them on the shelf. There was some mention on this forum of it being a common problem in Poland but no-one from the UK seemed to know anything about it.
