Be Excellent To Each Other

Paperclip

It's ok. I got a new one. My screen is now clean

More coolant bought, temp sender reseated. She'll not get the better of me!

2 of 4 right here (NSFW)

Which one's Cavey?

ALL. OF. THEM.

Ah mate, you just made my afternoon. What a wondrous sight.... you probably get shot at dawn for liking stuff like this these days, but like I said, I belong in a different era; earlier, simpler times.

.... What can I say. Just wonderful.

Driving to the MOT centre is just the right time to start hearing a mysterious rumbling noise from the back of the car. Gah.

Felt quite patronised when I checked it in and the man started asking me, quite aggressively, if I knew what a cam belt was and why I should have changed it at 40,000 miles.

Oh well, wonder what it'll fail on this time.

My cam belt is now 32,000 miles overdue. I've buried the worry

I keep a pair of tights closeby for that emergency.

Do you know if it's the kind of engine that wrecks itself if it goes?

No idea. It's a 2.0 HDI Diesel.

Isn't that a really short lifespan for a cambelt?

This made me do a sharp intake of breath.


That's basically all engines, isn't it? My Astra survived when it happened to me, but the mechanic who helped me sort it out said it was one of only a tiny handful he'd seen do that in a very long career. My understanding is you have very good odds of bending a valve stem or wrecking a con rod.

A quick google suggests that it is an interference engine so something will likely get broken if it snaps but that most people seem to have got away with a new set of rocker arms.

It should last as long as the flux capacitor if not put under stress.

Almost everything post 90s fiat Punto engines are interference. Meaning if the belt snaps your engine is lunched, even I would say it's worth getting done.

I've never quite understood this interference and non-interference engine 'choice'.

It's like, if Company A sold a torch where the bulb went out when the batteries went flat, and Company B sold a torch where the bulb went out and the torch exploded with sufficient energy to remove a hand when the battery went flat, why would anyone buy the torch off Company B? Why does Company B exist at all?

It's like, non-interference is the better option, surely?

Why do engineers at car manufacturers think, 'Ahhh yes, let's go for one of those splendid interference engines, they're the best'.

I justify my seat of the pants attitude by reminding myself that the cost of replacing the cam belt would be more than the value of the car.

My Peugeot smashed itself to bits. £2500 engine rebuild.

So the reason they're interference in the first place is to increase the compression ratio in the combustion chamber and raise valve clearances to improve charge flow. If you go for non interference you're basically stuck with a weak, inefficient engine right from the off.

To be clear it's a result of other improvements, not a design choice.

Also what happens to an engine after 60,000 miles if it's not serviced properly is hardly going to be high up the priority list for a designer.

Although having timing chains instead seems like a decent idea.

Oh wait, it was a timing chain that went on mine.

Yeah, I wish they all had chains rather than belts. Think I've got another 20,000 before mines due again.

DavPaz, get it done if you can. It might be more than the cars worth but having to be without a car while looking for a cheap replacement car where you don't really know if it needs a Cam Belt itself is not a good bud.

I've found they're actually worse. They don't go wrong as often but when they do instead of snapping the chain eats the inside of your engine. Also they cause weird, hard to diagnose running issues when they stretch and are an absolute fucker to replace. Regularly maintained cam belt ftw

Actually if I'm being fussy, gear driven cam ftw, can't kill those fuckers.

Where do you find them?

V6 Essex engines from the 70s and Bugattis. There'll be plenty of others but I don't know them.

#helpfullbeex

This seems like a good time to relate the story of my friend's Saab, which destroyed its universal belt while doing 80 mph down the motorway. Unbeknownst to him, a bearing had seized, so the belt was running over it instead of it turning. It got really hot and one day it basically exploded, shredding the belt and showering the engine bay with extremely hot fragments of bearing. It was fine afterwards, but it was an exciting few seconds for everyone as he lost power steering, turbo, water pump and so forth. Cleaning up was good, too. The shredded remains of the belt had a crosswise set of lumps missing out of it that exactly matched the toothed shape of the outside of the bearing housing -- we assume it was so hot that as the belt whipped across it at an angle, it just melted it into the shape of the bearing. And we found one of the balls almost entirely embedded into the top side of the engine bay tray, again, presumably having melted its way in there. We couldn't get it out, it was still there when he sold the car, years later.

Well then either keep it and change the belt or get rid of it.

Why? It works.

Dammit, you've got me looking at cars now...

Yeah, deffo time to get that cam belt sorted, Davpaz. Won't be funny when it fails; you could have your missus and kids in the car.

I bet it's less than replacing the car, though.

Get the water pump done too at the same time.

Yep. Get those belts changed. I'm not exactly proactive (I've got an indicator stalk that doesn't stay in and you have to hold it in) but it's one of the things I always get done.

Even if you don't give a shit about the car it could cause an incident when it actually snaps.

Title.

You know that when writing you can use actual quotes, right? Shift-2 on your keyboard HTH HAND

My favourite shitty car thing was when my Calibra would stall at idle when warm. When it was cold or hot, it was fine, but if it was somewhere inbetween you'd have to ride the throttle to stop it cutting out. I assume the fuel management was subtly borked. I put up with that for ages, years maybe.

I've had a few. My first car was a mini mk1, which had a broken subframe that needed welding from time to time. When it went, the car would try and take 90 degree right handers if you ever let go of the steering wheel. It also had shot synchro on 2nd, so would pop out of gear if you were freewheeling for a turn, meaning you had to wait for the revs to drop to idle before being able to put it back in gear.
My one and only new car purchase was a Fiat Punto, which didn't like cold weather. If you touched the brakes, a fuse would blow which controlled the immobiliser amongst other things, which meant you couldn't restart the car if you stopped. Fiat were unsurprisingly useless in fixing this issue and I took to travelling in the winter with a glovebox full of spare fuses. Fiat's eventual solution to the problem after repeated visits was to swap the 15A fuse for a 30A one!

Hmm, maybe Gaz is using a crazy foreign keyboard, and that's why he couldn't find the quotes.

ALT+34 should do the trick.

I mean, if the fuse was supposed to be a 30A then that explains why it kept blowing.

It was 15A according to the manual.

I broke the gearstick off on one of my scimitars and drove it for weeks using a screwdriver to lever the stub left over against the plastic trans cover.

Strong play here from the Lad from the Frozen North, I think he's got it in the bag folks...

Obig. "Princess Anne had a Scimitar".

Was it a or Phillips?

It was a flat hammer thru with a cracked plastic yellow handle.

Hmm, guess it wasn't the cracked one