Timing Belt Failure After Only 150mi!! WTF!?!?

Hello All,

For those of you who remembered this thread, and my unfortunate and incredibly unlucky incident with the highway token getting caught in my timing belts, I thought I would post how I recovered from the incident. For all those interested, my car has been back on the road for about a month, and it running absolutely flawlessly over the past 1500mi. Although the cause of the broken timing belt was strange, what surprised me most about this mishap, is how inexpensively I was able to get my car back on the road. Yeah, it took a ton of time to pull the motor again, but I actually only spent about $700.00 in parts and machine shop work to get everything back to tip-top shape. I was lucky in teh fact that I only needed to replace 4 exhaust valves (which I had already), 2 guides (to be safe), 4 valve oil seals, head gasket, timing belt, misc other gaskets, and about 2 hours machine shop time. The biggest part of the job was the labor but becasue I do my own work and enjoy it, I really feel that this potentially catastropic event turned out to be a small/mediun problem.

I had started the process of submitting a claim with my insurance company, and becasue it was due to a road-hazzard, they would have paid for the damages. The only problem was that I had removed the motor and torn it down before an adjuster could come look at it. This is only becasue I did not find the cause of the damage until after the motor was removed, and didn't even consider that "mechanical failures" would be a factor in an insurance claim. Proving everything they needed to know midway through the repair was just too much of a hastle and I did not follow thorugh with the claim...mostly becasue it wasn't worth the hassle for so little money.

So, thank you everyone with your overwhlming response and support after this mishap, and I am thouroghly enjoying driving my 308 this summer. If anyone has made progress on creating a vented belt guard, I would be interested as I am still not runing covers on the rear becasue I think the heat problem is a greater risk than another object hitting the "bullseye" a second time. Thanks again.

-Kevin Pearson