[slyalfa]

I think the hydraulic tensioner with the oil hole weled up is the way to go.

do a search and you will see time and time and time again bent valves etc with the thermocrap toy Tensioners

last time I looked I could not find one case with the hydraulic type. not counting things like never changeing the belt or towing with the car in gear spining the motor the wrong way.

With the old one there is not much to go wrong. But the new type seem to have a ton of things go wrong all the time. do a search for failed tensioner or bent valves. and see which type comes up over and over and over again.
most with low miles too.

that is my $0.02

P.S. if you have the chance to hold both in you hands you can see how crappy the new is vs the old one.

 

[slyalfa]

I just look at the track record. the oil weled up works. I am at somthing like 240,000 miles with one. never had a belt problem yet. I would like to get a new one I just put in new grease every 100,000 miles or so. but as a rule the water pump will let you know when it is time to change.. I think you are crazy not to change the belt at least by 60,000 if not sooner. heck I did it once in like 15 min. before work one day. the part that takes the most time is leting the coolent out. to remove the hose. if the only fear of the welded up it the belt might go bad some where over 100K
vs the one that seem to fail at 2k 5k 10k 15k 20k 25k 30k etc. I will take the one that wiil last over 100K and change it at 30k or 60k when ever my water pump starts to leak.

as for how it worked in the first place where the oil PSI let it lose. I have to say I never felt good with that. when is the oil PSI very hi. when the block is cold on start up. where is the most stress on the belt? on startup and when it is cold..

I think is is very clear from the track record this is one place where alfa did not do so well.
there is a few things that are very bad in this system.
The amount of wrap is to small
the square type teeth that are more prone to hop out.
and the crapy detensioner.

But you have to look at when this motor came out. it is a very old. and was never up dated.
if you look at a jap car ther belts now are good for very long runs but they do a test run of more then I would guess all the alfa v6 ever made. It is to bad alfa never went back and up dated the front after a few things were known to industry about belt driven cams.

but I guess they are resource short. and they had to do the 24V then move on the diesel etc. and they seem to not ever go back to the old to fix things. I can see why, they were a very cash poor at the time.