Over the past thirty five years, overhead camshafts have become more prevalent; engine designers began to favor timing belts over chains because timing belts need no lubrication and are much easier to replace when replacement is needed. Timing belts typically snake around idler pulleys and a special tensioner, and on most timing belt engines, the timing belt will drive the water pump, and on some, the belt even spins the oil pump (see 2.2L Toyota engines).

In contrast, soft failures are things that either give you ample warning before they fail completely, or their failure doesn’t immediately drag the car into the breakdown lane. A textbook soft failure is when the alternator or voltage regulator dies. Even though the battery is no longer being charged, the car can continue to run for some amount of time off the battery alone. On a vintage car like a 2002, you can likely drive for hours during daylight before the battery no longer has enough juice to light the spark plugs. On a late-model car loaded with electric motors and control modules, you might have more like fifteen minutes to an hour—enough to get to a rest area, possibly even a repair shop.

Some timing chains experience accelerated wear due to lack of vehicle maintenance (i.e. oil changes). Timing belts are not usually lubricated by engine oil (except for on some European makes), but timing chains always are. And that makes regular oil changes vital to timing chain longevity.

Older V8 and V6 engines (with almost no exceptions) have a single camshaft in the engine block just above the crankshaft. The crankshaft drives the camshaft via gears and a chain.

Each bank of cylinders on an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) has a camshaft that has spin in time with the power-producing crankshaft, which is driven by the pistons. The engine is basically a metal machine that breathes in air and fuel, uses it to produce power, and then sends the processed gasses out the tailpipe as CO2 and water vapor, and the valves that are operated by the camshaft must operate in the right sequence and in the right way.

You may be wondering—how long does a timing chain last? Unlike timing belts, timing chains are designed to last the life of the vehicle. Of course, that doesn’t always happen. Timing chains can break for a number of reasons, which we’ll discuss shortly.

I snugged them down, grabbed the wheel at 6 and 12 and verified that the play was gone, spun it and verified that the noise was gone, let the car down off the jack, and tightened them up with a torque wrench.

I was driving my 2003 E39 530i up to do some recording in Chelmsford, about 30 miles north of me, when I began to hear and feel a rumbling coming from the left front of the car. It ramped up over several minutes, but then plateaued. If it instead had gotten VERY loud VERY quickly, with obvious metal-smacking-against-metal instead of the more gentle rumble of a worn bearing, that would be the hallmark of loose lug nuts, something you need to pay attention to IMMEDIATELY because you may have only five or ten seconds before the wheel falls off.

Rear wheel bearings on old BMWs are incredibly robust. I’ve only ever had one go bad. It was on a Bavaria that my wife and I took on vacation to Martha’s Vineyard in 1986. We were foolishly driving in near-hurricane conditions and got caught in a tidal surge on the road that runs on the barrier beach between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs and drove through water that was deeper than we expected (as I said, foolish). On the drive home, the right rear wheel bearing began rumbling ominously. At the time, I didn’t own the necessary bearing puller, and had to take the car into the late great Beaconwood Motors who had the back page ad of Roundel for a generation. It was one of a handful of repairs the past 40 years I’ve paid someone else to do.

More serious problems will start to arise if you ignore the early signs so make sure to give the timing chain a check as soon as you hear a noise coming from its mounting location.

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Timing belts require routine replacement—timing chains do not. Unless the timing chain is broken, stretched, or otherwise compromised, there’s no reason to change it. If there is something wrong with the timing chain, your car will likely exhibit one or more problems.

The timing chain keeps the camshaft(s) and crankshaft in sync. For your car’s engine to run properly, the valves, which are operated by the camshaft, need to be timed with the movement of the pistons that connect to the crankshaft. Also, on some vehicles, the timing chain drives other components, such as the water pump and balance shaft.

There is always some mechanism connecting the crankshaft to the camshaft. For years there were engines that had the two shafts directly geared to each other, and there were timing marks on the cam and crank gears that had to be properly aligned during engine assembly. On those engines, the cam gear would typically be some kind of composite material to prevent the gears from making noise, which cam-driving gears are prone to do in a big way.

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Perhaps the down comforter of soft failures is a bad wheel bearing. Loss of lubrication will cause them to wear, resulting in a rumble that sometimes can be more felt than heard (they may also squeak or squeal), but the failure process is gradual. They’ll get louder as wear and play embrace each other in an ever-widening downward spiral, but you’d have to be an idiot not to hear it and address it, making outright failure rare. Wheel bearings are pretty robust in BMWs. After owning over 70 cars, I’ve only ever seen one wheel bearing that completely self-destructed—a ’67 2000CS I bought came with one that had destroyed the stub axle. I had to replace the entire front strut assembly.

And I’m going to have some sort of voodoo ceremony with that bag of Locktite-coated wheel bearing bolts. I can’t tell whether they were bad juju that triggered the problem or a talisman that warded off disaster, but clearly they played some role outside the normal Western vectors of Newtonian mechanics and Cartesian cause and effect. They deserve reverence.

The vehicle maintenance schedule calls for timing belt replacement at a specific mileage, so find out what that mileage is if your engine has a timing belt, and realize that you need to be the one to decide when the timing belt is replaced rather than letting the timing belt decide.

I can only speculate what happened. Due to the space constraints in my garage, when I swap winter/summer wheels, I’ll usually pull one end of the car in, jack it up, swap both wheels, snug the lug nuts with a ratchet, let the car down, torque the nuts, air the tires, then pull the car out, flip it around, and do the other side. I must’ve gotten interrupted. Maybe I received a text I felt that I needed to respond to. Maybe my wife was leaving and I walked outside to kiss her goodbye. Maybe I had back pain and took a break. I don’t know.

My Dad & both brothers owned a ’68 Dodge Polara. Same car, juz passed down. I have this weird memory of my Dad telling my oldest brother that it need to have a “California Setting” and I think it was in reference to the timing perhaps. Have you ever heard of this? I know someone who has another old Mopar with issues. Juz wondering if that would be something that she needs to check? Any info is more than I have now ? Thanks!

There’s a possibility you’ll hear a noise coming from the area of the timing chain cover. This noise is often caused by a loose timing chain that may be due to a faulty timing chain tensioner, guide or other issues.

On newer BMWs, the front wheel bearings are very different than on the 1970s-era cars. About ten years ago, I owned a ’99 E39 528iT wagon that needed struts, control arms, and other front-end work. The E39’s wheel bearings are part of an assembly that includes the front hub—the wheel bearing assembly bolts to the steering knuckle, and the wheel bolts directly to the bearing assembly.

The timing chain and gears can be installed after the crankshaft and camshaft are in place, especially in cam-in-block (OHV) engines.

Why do I have these and why can I lay my hands on them instantly? As Joseph Fiennes said in Shakespeare in Love, “It’s a mystery.”

Does my car have a timing belt or chainby reg

The vehicle maintenance schedule calls for timing belt replacement at a specific mileage, so find out what that mileage is if your engine has a timing belt, and realize that you need to be the one to decide when the timing belt is replaced rather than letting the timing belt decide. The timing belt doesn’t generally choose a convenient moment to fail.

Timing chains, on the other hand, are like bicycle chains, only thicker and denser. These are relatively heavier than timing belts as the chain links are made of steel.

When I arrived home, I pulled the nose of the car right into the garage, then hopped on the laptop to get a set of front wheel bearing on order. I looked on FCP Euro, and was more than a little surprised to find that a front wheel bearing kit with German FAG wheel bearing assemblies now cost $312. Of course, I still had that set of bolts, so I could save myself the $4.29 per bolt right there. I mean thirty-four bucks is thirty-four bucks, right? One FAG bearing was $139. I began entertaining replacing just the left bearing, then price-shopping other manufacturers, when I decided that I should be certain that the wheel bearing was really the problem.

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For the first part, there is the non-interference engine, also referred to by some as a “free spinning” engine. In this type of engine, the pistons can’t contact the valves even if the engine jumps time. The only thing you need to worry about if you have a non-interference engine is stalling or a serious loss of power, but you’ll definitely need a tow truck.

A roller chain produces less friction and stretch than a silent chain. It turns into a double roller chain if two chains are used side by side.

Timing chains don’t usually break (timing belts do!), but chains can get far enough out of time so that the vehicle can’t be driven. If you’re driving on the highway, the engine can instantly shut down without any warning. If this happens to you, immediately and carefully pull over to the side of the road while your car still has its momentum. This can happen with any type of internal combustion engine.

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I intentionally jacked up the car at the right front wheel—the one I didn’t think was making the noise—to get a baseline. I grabbed it at 6 and 12, rocked it, verified it was tight, and spun it. As expected, it was quiet.

After the recording session ended, I began driving back toward the highway. As I approached a small service station, I debated stopping to have them throw the car up on the lift and check it, but again, since the rumble remained low and constant, I headed home. Still, to err on the literal side of safety, I stayed in the right lane, turned the flashers on, and drove at 50 mph.

The timing chain on these older V style engines is of the laminated variety, somewhat prone to stretching, but very quiet in its operation. After about 100,000 miles, those laminated chains tend to develop enough stretch so that they sometimes strip the plastic-coated teeth off the cam gear and jump time.

One way or another, always follow the OEM recommendations for timing belt replacement. If the OEM calls for 60,000 miles, do it BEFORE that mileage. If it’s 104,000 miles, do it early. It’s the best policy. Whether you do it or hire it done, it needs to be done exactly right – a timing belt that is too loose will cause slapping sounds, and a belt that is too tight can make an odd whirring noise, believe it or not, so the timing belt tension has to be just right.

On 1970s-era BMWs, there are inner and outer front wheel bearings with each sitting in its own race that’s pressed into the hub. Since the front discs on these cars sit on the inside surface of the hub, and since the bearings lift out of their races and present their greasy private parts to you when you pull the hub off the spindle, the advice is that, if there’s no documentation on how old the bearings are, to replace both sets of bearings on both sides when the front discs are replaced.

If the timing chain jumps enough teeth on the older V engines, some of the valves can be opening far enough out of time that they can be bent by rising piston crowns.

Still, to be careful, I pulled into the right lane, slowed down, and listened. The somewhat rapid onset was uncharacteristic of a wheel bearing, but the other symptoms fit. Since I had a recording appointment with a fiddle player, I preferred to keep going, unless of course I couldn’t for safety reasons. The rumbling remained at a constant low level, so I assumed it was a wheel bearing doing the soft failure thing, and continued on.

I then jacked up the left front wheel and rocked it at 6 and 12. Yup, play. Then I spun it. Yup, rumbly. No doubt—a bad left wheel bearing. I set the car back down and began to walk back to the computer to order the bearings, vividly recalling how much of a pain in the butt they were to replace in the 528iT wagon ten years ago. I wondered if maybe still having those eight spare bearing bolts had made the whole thing a matter of fate.

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If, however, you are the DIY type, you may purchase a timing chain or belt and install it yourself at a price of around $80 to $250. But be aware that some timing chain kits may cost as much as $500 even from the parts store, and are very difficult to replace. A good timing chain kit will come with all the tensioners, the gears, and even a water pump in some cases.

The timing chain is the last to get lubrication upon engine start-up, so this process can help extend the replacement timing chain’s service life.

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My ever-rational left-brain shot back indignantly. “You can’t be serious,” it sneered. “You actually had a wheel fall off that 1600 back in 1984. And you’ve had two close calls, both more recently than you’d like to admit. You know what loose lug nuts sound like, and this wasn’t it. And you learned your lesson. You conditioned yourself to always tighten lug nuts with a torque wrench. It’s not loose lug nuts. Really. It’s not. It can’t be. You are not that careless.”

A silent chain operates quietly but has the tendency to stretch after some time. Also known as a flat-link or Morse type, this chain has metal links that appear to be stretching because the pin bushings at each joint wear out.

The crankshaft on those engines is always fitted with a steel gear and keyed to the crankshaft boss to keep it one with the crank, and the camshaft typically has an aluminum gear with a similar arrangement and the camshaft gear teeth is heavily coated in plastic. The diameter of the camshaft gear is twice that of the crankshaft gear because the camshaft only spins at half the speed of the crankshaft by design. This is true even on modern engines.

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It’s true, timing chains can wear out and stretch, especially if the engine isn’t maintained properly with the correct type of oil. But there are also many timing chains that do last the life of the vehicle. Thanks for the feedback!

Your car’s engine contains many components, one of which is either a timing belt or a timing chain. Although the timing chain doesn’t get as much attention atims some other car parts, it is extremely important. If the timing chain fails, it can cause an array of problems—including catastrophic engine damage.

Engines with timing belts may or may not be damaged if the timing belt strips its teeth. Fords and Toyotas with timing belts don’t usually suffer engine damage when the belt fails, but Mitsubishi and Kia engines typically DO suffer engine damage. Some Kia four cylinders will quite literally destroy themselves if they jump time because they tend to snap the heads off valves. Mitsubishi timing belted engines will usually just bend valves.

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In the repair world, there are “hard failures” and “soft failures.” Hard failures are things that instantly drag a car to a stop when they break. Broken ball joint? The worst type of hard failure—the front wheel folds under the fender like a broken ankle and you lose control of the car. Bad fuel pump? Usually a hard failure—it either pumps or it doesn’t. (Okay, there are some exceptions. The one my E39 wigged out on a low tank in hot weather, then recovered. I replaced it anyway.)

But even if they don’t jump, they can stretch enough to allow the camshaft to be spinning just a little bit behind the crankshaft, putting the camshaft slightly out of time. This affects valve timing and causes a loss of engine vacuum, as well as, a loss of engine power.,

Pro Tip: Sometimes a loose and rattling chain will rub a hole in the timing cover, necessitating the replacement of the cover.

Some timing chains drive the water pump, too, and sometimes the engine must be removed to replace a timing chain. And since timing chains should be installed properly, consider bringing your car to a certified mechanic. There are a lot of other engine parts that must be removed before you even get to the timing chain!

When getting a new car timing chain, most experts recommend soaking it in oil before installing it in the engine to make sure that it’s fully lubricated.

I will be showing your article to a customer. I firmly disagree with one thing, but your article is “geared”(I had to say it! Sorry)more towards anything other than an American V8 or V6. Timing chains were known to stretch and wear out their nylon cam gears in as little as 80k miles, hopefully not the life of the engine! By rotating the crank BACKWARDS to TDC, removing the distributor cap, then rotating it FORWARDS until the distributor rotor begins to move, check the timing mark, how many degrees you’ve moved the crank (divided by 2 because cam spins at half speed of crank)and that’s how many degrees you’re”out of phase/sync.” Rule of thumb: IF YOU SAY “WOW!” BECAUSE YOUVE TURNED THE CRANK SO FAR WITH NO ROTOR MOVEMENT, YA NEED A NEW ONE.(also be sure to check distributor drive gear to be sure it hasn’t sheared the pin) WELL WRITTEN AND THANK YOU

Timing belts and timing chains both serve the same purpose—and that’s to keep the camshaft(s) and crankshaft in sync. But there are differences. For one, timing belts need to be replaced periodically in accordance with the vehicle manufacturer’s maintenance schedule.

And so, just to be certain, to placate my left brain and make sure I didn’t go to all that work unless it was absolutely necessary, I took a 1/2-inch ratchet and a 17mm socket and checked the wheel’s lug nuts.

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Richard McCuistian has worked for nearly 50 years in the automotive field as a professional technician, an instructor, and a freelance automotive writer for Motor Age, ACtion magazine, Power Stroke Registry, and others. Richard is ASE certified for more than 30 years in 10 categories, including L1 Advanced Engine Performance and Light Vehicle Diesel.

An interference engine will bend or break valves because the pistons and the valves will impact each other if the engine jumps time. Timing chain equipped engines are ALWAYS interference engines. And again, timing belt engines may or may not be, depending on the manufacturer. So, a jumped chain or belt can call for belt replacement, a valve job, or a replacement engine, depending on engine design.

Then I checked the lug nuts on the right front wheel. While none were loose to the point of being free-spinning, all were substantially below the 88 foot-pound torque spec. The rears were fine.

Should the nylon chain guides or the chain tensioner fail, or should the engine develop a loss of oil pressure so that the tensioner doesn’t work right (as on 5.4L three-valve Fords), the timing chain will be free to slap around against other components; sometimes a loose and rattling chain will rub a hole in the timing cover, necessitating the replacement of the cover.

Of course, a broken timing belt may have other adverse effects on your engine depending on what type it is. There are two kinds of piston engines you need to consider if you want to know what could happen when your timing chain fails.

Although bearing rumble is usually quite clear, part of testing for a bad wheel bearing is to jack the car up, set it on stands, grab the wheel at the 6:00 and 12:00 positions, and push-pull it. If you’re hands are at 3:00 and 9:00 instead, play in a front wheel can come from anything in the steering mechanism, but 6-and-12 play pretty much has to be coming from the wheel bearing. In an old-school car with adjustable wheel bearings, if there’s no rumble, you can try adjusting the bearing by pulling the cotter pin and moving the castellated nut by one notch, but play plus rumble equals bad.

To make sure this doesn’t happen again, I’m instituting a new system of checking the lug nuts on all four wheels after I’ve done any work where a car is jacked up for any reason.

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Rob’s newest book, The Best of The Hack Mechanic, is available here on Amazon, as are his seven other books. Signed copies can be ordered directly from Rob here.

Because of the long distance between the crankshaft and camshaft gears, there are nylon guides to prevent the timing chain from making noise; there’ll be a guide on both sides of the chain(s), and one of the guides typically has a tensioner that has a piston-style tensioner, usually driven by oil pressure, but sometimes driven by an internal gas charge. When a timing chain of this design begins to rattle and the camshaft(s) get out of time, it’s usually because one or more of the nylon guides and/or the timing chain tensioner have failed.

Rob Siegel has been writing the column The Hack Mechanic for Roundel Magazine for 35 years, and is the author of eight books available on Amazon. He currently owns thirteen cars. Yes, his wife knows about all of them.

There are also differences in design. A timing belt is a large black rubber band that loops around the pulleys and a series of tensioners. It features teeth that hug the grooves around the outer side of the pulley. The belt has either a smooth or patterned outer surface.

The cost of replacing the timing chain varies depending on where you’re having it replaced and your vehicle model. Prepare to have a repair budget of around $1,000 to $2,500 for both the parts cost and labor if you’re expecting a timing chain replacement.