And if the exhaust valves open too early, the combustion chamber will lose pressure and cause a power loss. If the intake valves open too early, there may be too much fuel-air mixture flowing into the engine combustion chamber, leading to poor combustion and power loss. If the crankshaft and camshafts are not operating in unison, the vehicle will not run correctly. This ensures that the engine intake and exhaust valves open and close in time with the pistons. It synchronizes the movement of the crankshaft and camshafts. The timing belt is a rubber belt with hard teeth that interlock with the cogwheels of the crankshaft and the camshafts. It also sometimes powers the water pump, oil pump and injection pump. Think of a timing belt like a bike chain for your vehicle-it keeps all the internal moving parts of an engine in sync. Read: The Car Maintenance Checklist Every Driver Needs What is a timing belt? Replacing the timing belt is an important maintenance item! So, if you own a car, you should understand how a timing belt works and when to replace it. The timing belt makes sure everything in the engine is operating smoothly, keeping you safe on the road. For jokes, music, cooking, dating-even engines! That’s because your car’s engine relies on a timing belt to stay in sync. As to what you were up to when the Jeep hit you, I guess that'll have to remain a mystery.Timing is everything. And if it doesn't work, you already have your new belt ready for when you finish rebuilding the cylinder head.Īs my late brother would have said: "You must have lived a good, clean life" up to that point, David. If the car starts, you'd be the happiest guy in middle-of-nowhere Indiana that day. Even though there's only a small chance that the engine survived, a belt costs just a few bucks and takes an hour or so to install. You might as well put on a new belt and try it. So you just completely lucked out in terms of where the valves were positioned at the moment the belt broke.Īnd your mechanic did absolutely the right thing. I'd say in 95 percent of cases, when a timing belt breaks on a car with an interference engine (where the valves and pistons can collide if things go wrong), at least one of the valves gets crushed, and you end up having to rebuild the entire cylinder head.īut in order for that to happen, one of the valves has to be pretty much all the way open inside the cylinder when the belt breaks, so a rising piston can crush it.Īnd in about 5 percent of cases, the belt just happens to break during one of those few nanoseconds when none of the valves is fully opened. You should have run right out and bought a lottery ticket after the Civic started, David. Can you explain this miracle? - David Luck. But it survived a broken timing belt and worked fine (until it was destroyed by a Jeep, but that's another story). It worked fine, and lasted another 125,000 miles.īut why did it work? Everything I've read and everyone I've talked to has said that this car had an interference engine. I happened to find a mechanic who agreed to put on a new belt and just try and see if it would work. Everyone said that if the valves weren't ruined right when the belt broke, I definitely ruined them by cranking the engine. I pulled off to the side of the road - the cold, dark, middle-of-nowhere, Indiana road - and just to make sure to do the worst thing I possibly could do, I then cranked the engine. At 105,000 miles, the timing belt broke while we were driving.
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