12 years old Belts....look!

Everything is good until it's not.

Would rather not find out what the exact lifespan is of a timing belt but that's just me

There still exists an 'edible' 118 year old ham. I would pass on that as well.

 

Its often the bearings that fail & if you don't take the belts off then its not that easy to check them properly - by which time you may as well replace the belts because they are cheap.

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/11/edible-100-year-old-cake-scott-expedition-found-antarctic/

Still edible, go ahead and take a bite.

 

"That belt looks great... except for the broken part"

 

I can clearly see DIRT on them!!

I would keep the v belts as roadside spares....

 

Not an exact parallel, but I once drove on 12+ year-old tires that looked good - minimal dry rot - but that, when faced with a wet road and decent downhill gradient, decided to teach me a lesson about plasticity. Sure, they looked like good tires, but the rubber was no longer compliant, and provided no grip. The snap spin when I had to hit the brakes to avoid a merging car was fast enough that I couldn't even say "Oh sh*t" before I was looking directly at the car behind me.

Why this story? Rubber belts age, too. They may look good, but they may have lost the plasticity / elasticity that is necessary for them to function correctly.

 

I just did an engine out on a 348, after 5 years and 5,000 miles of aging. The belts were in great shape … but … during disassembly the plastic timing belt housing disintegrated into sharp little pieces, one of which wedged itself in between the timing belt and its sprocket. Imagine what would have happened if that car was to run for another 7 years and sometimes between year 6 and year 12 the plastic housing decided to let go. It would be instant belt shred and engine up in smoke.

It is not the belt, it's everything else but the belt. Your car and your money. You decide what chances to take. Good luck. I am sticking to 5 years.

 

Belts contain fibers that you can not see. It's your car, so do as you please... as for me, I see enough costly deferred maintenance on a daily basis to know that it's a bad idea.

With regularity, I inform customers that their brakes, tires, fluids, etc are EOL. They ignore it, and ... whatever. They'll pay double at some point when catastrophe occurs. Your 12 yr old belt opinion...same thing.

 

Funny how nobody gives a second thought to revving the crap out of their Honda from stone cold yet there are millions of them out there being driven with 10+ year old timing belts. Most of these cars have terribly deferred maintenance yet failure rates are tiny and are normally in the most neglected and abused examples.

Belt and tensioner construction between a Honda and Ferrari are near enough the same but here even the most technical minded users shake in fear beyond 3 years and think that anything beyond 5 years is Russian roulette. I think it’s total nonsense. A well cared for car that is regularly used can easily go 10 years on the stock belts at which time a comprehensive service including hoses represents good preventive maintenance.

Simply put unfounded fear leads to over-servicing which keeps the shops busy with little more than make work projects.

 

I service my Porsches, my Lexus, my Audi, my BMW on schedule as recommended by the factory. I don't own a Honda but if I did, I would have serviced it according to recommended schedule too. I actually overdo it with oil changes but that is minor stuff.

Once again, it is your car, your money, your risk. Do what you want and quit telling other people to do what you do if they don't agree with you.

 

Here's the difference: I can find a Honda motor in a Pick-n-Pull lot for what, $900? So if the belt that I thought might last 10 years only last seven, big deal.

A Ferrari motor? That's a catastrophic in terms of cost. And you won't find one at the local salvage yard.

 

I temper what the car companies publish with real world experience. For this reason I don’t believe in 20K oil changes because I have proof that this is a marketing ploy to sell new cars not caring about the long term wear once the warranty has expired.

When Ferrari publishes a belt change interval that is 1/2-1/3 the life of most other manufacturers who use a similar system I look at what the rate of belt failures is. Again this is a totally unfounded practice that leverages fear to get the cars in the dealer for service.

Yes the cost of a failure on a Ferrari is very high but the recommended service intervals are so massively inside the life of the parts that you run a bigger risk of failure by disturbing a perfectly working machine to change parts.

There is a balance between ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ and a 3-5 year belt interval. For me somewhere around 10 years is well within the safe period at which time other rubber items are best changed as part of a major service and inspection.

 

Doesn't it get boring having all these "experts" tell you why belts and bearing that didn't fail should have failed? And it particularly annoying when none of them has ever experienced a failure. Shoulda, woulda, coulda, but didn't.
Sick of it.

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For what it is worth, I have actually experienced a belt failure. Not on a Ferrari, but on a Porsche. Bought used, with 6-year-old belts. Recommended life was about 3. Looked good enough that I decided to try and drive it ~1 hour home. Drove for about 15 minutes, warm the car up and not aggressively, before it snapped on me.

 

And that's exactly what the cool aid makes what to hear. 3300 people die in car accidents each day in the US. Y T F are you getting in a car?

 

What's even more annoying is people who are wanna-be experts that deliberately ignore the posts where the real experts have posted about belt failures, and the wanna-be's ignore those posts and pretend they never existed.

Rifledriver has posted, multiple times over the years, that he has worked on 308s that have experienced belt failures - surely you'd have to acknowledge his testimony as valid and proof that belt failures do happen?

Here's one such post from 2014:

Now tell me again how none of the experts have ever seen or experienced a belt failure? Or are you going to ignore this post entirely, again, so that you can still claim that nobody has ever seen a cam belt failure?

 

I can't afford a new engine, but I can afford to properly maintain the one I have.

 

I also experienced timing belt failure on a newly purchased, low mileage, 1 owner, Porsche 928 a week after being inspected by a factory trained mechanic and being told “the belts look like new so no need to replace”. Or maybe that did not happen and the “cool aid makes” just implanted that memory in my head along with the lunar landings and the American flight that hit the Pentagon....


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928 had a piss poor belt tensioning system which resulted in I believe the entire timing belt paranoia across all brands.

 

No idea about the Porsche. I do have an idea (= experience) about 208-308-328 belts: no failure ever seen except for brand new bad installed belts (immediately after some days). That's a world wide proven fact. 8 years changing do offer an excellent warranty about belt realiability, up to 10 years.

I saw many failures about fuel lines, distributor, fuse box, brake pump: change them, and coolant (that cannot last 12 years without eating the engine block)

But you may change oil every week, coolant every month and belts every two years: it won't affect the car!

ciao

PS
bearings they use here in belt replacing are the same of Fiat Ducato 2500 Diesel, an heavy duty vehicle. They won't fail after 10 k miles or after 10 years. better checking the air/fuel mixture, that can destroy liners if not correct. My mechanic is not stupid, he changed 308 belts since the seventies and never experienced a failure! and he owns a 308 too… why should he destroy his engine?

 

There is another theory that I heard. As we all know the majority of Ferraris are not driven. So when the car is left for extended periods of time, the belts can develop flat spots, just like the tires and this causes earlier than normal failure - maybe not a snap, but more likely a jumped tooth. So the factory recommendation is time based for very practical reasons.


However, if you drive your car everyday like the Honda or even just regularly, it's probably going to be fine for many thousands of miles, so a mileage based service will work. There are way too many Ferraris with no miles on them. Because there is some sort of culture that exists that says if you have more than 10k on a Ferrari it's worthless. Let's be frank - if the factory said change the belt at 60K like a regular car, there would be like 12 people only changing their belts. So please go drive.

 

Age affects, of course, not only mileage (or nobody would change a belt on a Ferrari, as most of them are below 100000 km or not much over). But with the average mileage we do (100-1000-2000 each year, usually no more) 8 years are a very safe time interval. What I STRONGLY recomend is that when you change them, you will have it done by the best experienced mechanic available and with the best quality spare parts (that maybe haven't the pracing horse on their boxes…)

ciao

 

How about bladder failure. Anyone here experienced that?



guessing just a few seconds after belt failure.

 

One of the most misleading and gross overstatements I have ever read on Fchat. Congrats you have set a record for ********.