[V8] Timing belts: RE: '93 V8

[Roger M. Woodbury]

It seems from the pictures that the timing belt may have been done.  OK.
Maybe.

But, since the car is now 13 years old, was this the first timing belt or
the second one?  There is no real good reason why a timing belt won't go
thirteen years.  I know of a 928S4 that had its first timing belt done at
fifteen years, and it looked like new.

But here is what my experience with the 4.2 litre V8 Quattro is.

When I bought my first '93 V8 Quattro, I bought it from the huge Audi dealer
outside of Philadelphia.  The car had been traded in on an A8, and the car
had been serviced by the former Audi Master Tech who had transformed himself
into a BMW Master Tech at the BMW dealer.  He had been a personal friend of
the V8's owner.  The timing belt service had been done around 600 miles
before I bought the car.  That car had 61,000 miles on it since new at that
point.

After I had had the car in service for ten or fifteen thousand miles...I
forget which...the car started to smoke from under the hood at stop lights.
Obviously something was leaking oil or something onto an exhaust manifold.  

At first is wasn't too bad.  But it got worse, and finally in the late
summer it was smoking like an old small block Chevy, and the car went to the
wrench's to see what was wrong.

At the end of a marathon session, it was the camshaft gasket on the right
side.  But since we were in there, we did a whole lot of stuff.  And the
first thing that we found when the front end came off and we looked at the
timing belt was that, sure enough, the timing belt was new.

But the tensioner and rollers were original and pretty well worn.  Not
catastrophically worn, but not ready to go another sixty thousand miles,
either.

So a timing belt service MUSt be documented as far as what was done, and
when and by whom.  Otherwise, PLAN on doing a complete timing belt service.
Once the covers are all off, since you're going to be "there" anyway, the
hydraulic pump, water pump, assorted gaskets and seals and a partridge in a
pear tree will have to be replaced also.

And once its all over, the car will probably be ready for another sixty five
or seventy-five thousand miles, and the cost of the car will be whatever the
final cost was, plus about bunch more to make it right.

Roger