Series III camshaft sprocket - should I replace it?

[Ed Poore]

Right following on from my success rebuilding the gearbox it was decided to fix the smoking issue with the engine. Having never properly seen inside an engine before (surprisingly).

Finally after a saga with various components - the wrong main bearings being supplied, then a broken oil ring in one of the kits and now the wrong size crank / flywheel oil seal I'm finally getting things back together along with spouting various select words about suppliers . Basically I've got to the point of re-doing the timing, my carefully marked up spots have disappeared after the block went away for honing so timing needs to be done from scratch.

I suddenly noticed this morning whilst dunking all the various sprockets / chains in petrol to clean off the huge amounts of gunk (went through two rolls of industrial size toilet paper and ~1/2l of petrol cleaning up the fly-wheel housing alone) that there are quite a few damaged teeth on one size of the camshaft sprocket. One of the "sprockets" is ok whilst the outer one is the one with all the damage, I do have some photos but on a different computer so don't have access at the moment.

So - should I replace the sprocket or not? In my opinion the chain will still grip etc. but I'd assume the damaged teeth would mean that the problem's simply going to get worse faster?

As an added problem - I've got to try and get this thing rebuilt, running and MOTed in the next 6 days... before I move up to Surrey. I'll be popular with the neighbours if the first thing I do when I move in is litter the garden with Landy bits . I was going to try and refrain from that for at least a year...

[ejparrott]

I'd replace it, but thats me....I can only see it chewing the one half of the chain and leading to premature failure....If you've gone this far, why skim on a sprocket?

[Ed Poore]

If you've gone this far, why skim on a sprocket?

True. My main concern is getting the thing up and running quickly so was contemplating building it, MOTing it and then re-doing the timing at a slightly later stage once it's on the road. I'll order a sprocket and depending on when it arrives I can either fit it before or after.