Aftermarket cam tensioners

[MikkiJayne]

Since I've had this thing in front of me I've been thinking about what Mannyo said about oil pressure. Looking at it, it seems that the top shoe is a lightly-spring sprung tensioner which is backed up by oil pressure, and the bottom shoe is the one used to vary the timing by moving the whole assembly up and down.

Looking at pics of new ones, the bottom shoe on mine appears to be in the correct location, so now I'm puzzled why it seemed to be so slack, but more specifically, why the other bank isn't slack? The chains are the same side to side so why the different behaviour?

I was thinking perhaps an oil retention valve had failed on bank 1 and so was letting pressure out of the tensioner, but in that case why would it be sitting so high on bank 1 compared to bank 2? Surely it would be the other way round?

Also, when I've been compression testing the engine has been spinning long enough that it should have oil pressure so should have pumped up the tensioner. Perhaps there is indeed silicone inside it blocking it up?

Does anyone have a pic of how both of them look in a working engine please?