My car just broke down a week or two ago while driving on the highway. The blue dragon (as I call her) had been running a bit odd and missing every now and again – I had originally thought it might be water in the fuel. But, when it broke down, there was fuel coming out of the intake manifold and going into the air cleaner. Sounded like a timing issue. After about a week of after-work effort and a few bloody knuckles, look what I found:

About 3/4ths of the teeth on the camshaft’s timing gear are missing! I have an “Iron Duke” engine from late 1987, the cam and crank timing gears go straight together.

When I got my puller on the gear and pulled, this happened. This is ok, I’ve decided I’m just going to dremel the rest of the cog off of the camshaft.

The gear was really chewed up.

Catastrophic failure.