so i'm trying to get my timing belt on and i get frustrated because no matter what i do the belt keeps slipping to the driver's side on the cam gears. i think my torque wrench is inaccurate and it's not really torquing the tensioner pulley to 21 ft/lbs. after the 3rd try, i temporally quit and decide to work on getting everything else in place. so i'm putting my MAP sensor back in place and i tried to bolt the missing link into place and it wouldn't fit. the holes were drilled in the wrong spots. cool.

i take it down to the vice and drill bigger holes. cool. metal shavings everywhere now. i bring it to the sink and i'm playing around with it when i notice...

...a probable cause for my problems with my old missing link.

i sent in my missing link to Synapse in CA and they sent me back a new one. they said the reason why my old one didn't work correctly was because it was "excessively dirty and you should keep it clean in the future"

yeah. cool. they were full of crap. my missing link spotless when i shipped it to them (inside and out)

so when i was trying to get the metal shavings out from the manifold side of it, i notice a small pinhole in the top half, the MAP sensor side. seems to be a very small outside air vent.

my guess is that this pinhole was placed to create some sort of hystersis, like a filter or some type of averaging thing during the vacuum/boost transistion, much like in circuit design when a capacitor is placed between ground and the output of an integrated circuit to reduce oscillation on the output.