Do I have a timing issue?

[Salgar]

I've just finished quite a lot of work (for me) on my car.

I've spent a bunch of evenings over the last few weeks replacing: Water Pump, Cam belt, radiator, thermostat housing, thermostat, PS belt, All water hoses except the heater hoses, Air filter and just generally cleaning my cars insides (The top radiator hose burst while driving and rusty water went *everywhere*).

So yesterday I finally finished everything off, it took me quite a while. This is the first time I've ever done any real work on a car, the most I'd done before was change oil/filters/plugs.

So I fired it up, at 1am last night, and everything seemed okay, I have a small leak from the bottom radiator hose but it's just not on properly, will fix that this evening. I'm also going to make sure I check the oil today too. It needs replacing soon anyway.

The one thing I am concerned about, is that I put the cam belt back on properly, it appears to run fine, although there is some, what I can only describe as 'clinking' from the exhaust cam side, it's not very loud, it may have even been there before, but I'm paranoid I've gotten something wrong. I made sure I marked the cam pulleys before I took them and the belt off and put everything back properly and to the right tooth, but obviously as I've never done it before, i'm paranoid something is wrong now.

Is there any way I can tell if I've put everything back together properly? What would happen if I was one tooth off one of the cam pullies? I went for a drive and the car drove pretty well, better than before (probably down to the new air filter as my old one was very full of solid dirt). I'm thinking about taking it somewhere to get the timing checked out and adjusted, but I assume that will not help if I've got the belt not on one of the cams properly.

Any Advice welcome
Thanks

[snotrag]

Not a noisy tappet is it? Metallic-sounding nose?

Its useful to think about how 'fast' it is?

Does it rise and fall exactly with engine speed?
Once per rotation? more?

Thats a useful way of working out what rough parts it could be.

I know how blooming difficult it is to describe noises using words too!

[Salgar]

snotrag said:

Not a noisy tappet is it? Metallic-sounding nose?

Its useful to think about how 'fast' it is?

Does it rise and fall exactly with engine speed?
Once per rotation? more?

Thats a useful way of working out what rough parts it could be.

I know how blooming difficult it is to describe noises using words too!

It is a kind of tappet sound, I do have noisy tappets whenever I start up and they go away after about a minute, which as far as I understand is normal. This could be just one tappet continuously making this noise, it is a metallicy sound.

From what I remember, I couldn't hear it as much at higher revs, it certainly didn't increase volume, it may have increased frequency with more revs.
It was possibly once per revolution (of something). It seemed to disappear for about a second every 5-10 seconds and then come back, which is a bit weird.

I will try and get some more accurate answers to these questions this evening.