Pain and Pleasure times of the 200 20v

[Huw Powell]

> Hmmmm A bad mechanic to .... second opinion.... I was hoping for more insight.

Ah, you get what you pay for...

> First off... I do not agree with Richard that one can't blow a distributor with a shorted wire... A short can blow anything including a fuse.

Let's start there.  A distributor is a mechanical device.  A gear on the
camshaft drives a shaft which spins relative to the casing.  On the end
of the shaft is mounted a rotor, which carries the spark voltage from
the center of the cap to the outer terminals on the cap.  the cap and
rotor could be destroyed but are replaceable.  There is an electrical
device in the distributor called a hall sender, it creates a small
signal in reaction to a little metal cup with five notches in it (# of
notches = # of cylinders).  It initiates the coil firing sequence
directly or via the ignition ECU.  *It* could be destroyed easily with a
"short" of some sort.  it can also be replaced.  It's connector on the
side of the dist. could be broken or intermittent or shorting.  it can
be repaired/replaced also.

> What is weird is there is no stretch marks on the timing belt or the cover to suggest that something fell into the head etc..... For among other things the mechanic would have definitely told me since the postmortem would have brought it out. It seems most likely that the drive from the crank end caused this shearing on the cam shaft sprocket and not vice-versa. Though what still remains a mystery is how did it manage to shear the sprocket without doing anything to the timing belt .....

So now I just cropped your email a bit so I could reply to the salient
parts... Nice job of quoting the *entire* digest to whine about not
hearing what you wanted.

Shearing... probably not the actual belt driving teeth... more likely
the woodruff key(s).  Lost, damaged, misinstalled... 



-- 
Huw Powell

http://www.humanspeakers.com/audi/

http://www.humanthoughts.org/