Balance Shaft Complete Removal Many of you have often heard about the mysterious balance shaft removal and may have asked why would I want to do this in the first place. Well, under normal driving conditions and regular maintenance, the balance shafts and the drive chain can be your friend. However, if you have not serviced your car since you got your driver's license or you are pursuing higher performance, the balance shafts and the tiny little chain can cause some serious damage. No kidding, the thing is no bigger than a small bicycle chain and does not appear to be much stronger. Let me take a second to note that I am not advocating the removal of this piece, but merely showing you how if you decide to do it. Once you decide this is something you want to do, there are basically two approached. One involves just removing the chain and leaving the balance shafts and tensioner in place. This can be accomplished by removing the oil pan and breaking the chain pulling it out. This is not that difficult, but leaves the possibility that the tensioner arm could come loose, exposing one of the many oil channels leading to a potential loss in oil pressure. A variation on this is to also remove the timing cover and put a blanking plate over the balance shaft tensioner oil channel hole. I have done this on my old 9000 Aero and it worked well. However, with this project, we are going all the way. That means full removal of everything! Below I will walk you through what in entailed in fully removing the balance shafts.     Here you find a picture of the block after all the nasty little bits have been removed. You will note the two rather large holes where the balance shaft used to be along with the tensioner spot.   Click to enlarge This a a diagram of the internal oil channels within the block, however blurry it is. The important thing to note is that the front and rear balance shaft bearing are supplied with oil via oil channels that come up from the bottom of the block through the crankshaft bearing. I will show photos of these below. In order to perform this procedure, the objective will be to seal off these oil channels to maintain proper oil pressure. You will do this in the rear by pressing the existing aluminum bearings back so that they cover the oil feeder channels. In the front, you will cover the channels with freeze plugs, but I will cover this in more detail below.   Click to enlarge The front balance shaft bearing is actually incorporated into the balance shaft so the only concern is how to plug the oil channels. Below you can see the oil channels for the front bearings.   Click to enlarge The feeder holes for the rear bearing come from the #3 crankshaft bearing and are only visible with the crankshaft removed, so don't bother trying to find them unless you have removed this. I have high lighted the feed holes in red. From the crank side of the block you can also see the oil feed holes for the front bearings as well which come up through crankshaft bearing #0.   Click to enlarge With the balance shafts removed from the block, you will note that each bearing has a center channel through which oil is supplied to the bearing. In this case, I have already removed the drive sprocket from the end of one of the shafts as I will use it as the tool to press the bearing. What I have done, is to use a socket that was 42mm in diameter as the press. Given the tight tolerances within the block, none of my seal presses would work. So, I came up with this for a tool.   Click to enlarge I inserted the balance shaft with the socket attached into the balance shaft chamber to press the bearing approximately 5mm tapping is with a hammer in many small progressions. Now, if you are doing this without the block disassembled, you will NOT be able to see how much you are pressing the bearing so you need to take great care in measuring how much you move it.   Click to enlarge Here you can see one of the bearings inside the balance shaft tube with four oil feeder holes positioned around the bearing. The pressing tool has to be able to fit within the block and be flat enough to catch the front edge of the bearing without getting stuck.   Click to enlarge Below is a picture of a bearing that I have pressed out approximately 5 to 6mm and you can see that it has slightly come out of its original position. Below that is the bearing on the other side. Since I had the block disassembled, I was able to confirm that the bearings were in fact sealed by blowing compressed air in the channels and checking for leaks.   Click to enlarge Now with the rear bearing properly positioned, you can focus on sealing the front bearing oil feed channels. First, I made sure that the bearing holes were clean and oil free. Then, I placed a thin layer of LocTite 518 in the holes before pressing in the 1 3/4 inch freeze plugs. Also, just for good measure, I inserted a machine screw in the upper feed hole as seen on the upper right. Also, you can see the plate I used to seal off the balance shaft tensioner oil feed hole.   Click to enlarge