Did you notice any wear or stretch on the balance shaft chain and guides? Wondering if its worth it to do it and just do the timing chain. Also I think im having a hard time understanding what you meant when the timing marks dont line up at first. Once you set crank pulley at TDC shouldn't it be good?
I didn't notice anything wrong with the balance shaft chain or guides but there's not really any way to check for stretch without measuring (which I did not do). I'll measure if you can find a spec. You should be fine skipping replacement. I did it while I was there because I figured "why not."
The timing marks I'm speaking of are the tick marks on the cams and crank that line up with the colored links on the timing chain. When you put the crank pulley at TDC it doesn't necessarily line up the timing marks.They only all line up (camshaft system & balance shaft system) every 160ish rotations of the engine or some crazy number. I read that it's because the camshaft chain takes twenty some rotations to line up while the balance shaft takes 7 rotations. So the only time the camshaft system and balance shaft system both line up is twenty something times 7, ie 160ish rotations.
Instead of rotating the crank around that many times I rotated it around a few times until it was close to being lined up. The balance shaft system marks were aligned and the camshaft system was a single link off. I figured the marks didn't need to line up as long as the crank/cams didn't move and I maintained the correct number of links between marks. I put the new chain back on in the same configuration (single link offset). If you look closely at my picture of the cams below you will see that the colored links of the chain are a single link ahead of the timing marks on the cams.
The service manual doesn't mention this so I was quite confused when I took the timing/cam covers off and the marks weren't lined up. It took some googling to figure out what was going on.