Problems With The Idler Pulley

[NisGTR]

I was driving my car lastnight on the freeway doing 80km/h on 5th about 2,500rmp when I heard a loud ceramic clicking sound from the engine. I straight away turned off my car and managed to pull over on the emergency lane.

Today I was going through the car and found that the bolt on the idler pulley completely snapped and the timing belt came loose. i'm just wondering am I looking at any engine damage?

Thanks

[89CAL]

Ceramic Clicking sound?

It all depends on how loose the belt got and if it started slipping teeth. Sounds like you might have tapped the valves on the pistons a bit if it was macking clicking/ticking noises, but hard to know for sure. I'd probably pull the head off and have a look or get a borescope or whatever those camera on a stick things are and poke it down the spark plug holes and see if you can see any damage on the pistons

You could turn the engine over by hand and see if it still turns O.K if you didnt want to do any of that, but then you risk hitting the pistons again or putting the belt further out of position.

[NisGTR]

more of a clicking sound if anything. when I pulled over I had a mate standing there watching as I cranked the engine once just to see what it was. noise was coming more from the fan/cam gears, basically as I was craking it the teeth were skipping. Today we roatated the cam gears both intake and exhaust and it seems like intake side was harder to move then the exhaust. Tomorrow we are going to look deeper, really dont want to take off the head, thats a last resort, I might borrow a borescope of someone i know

thanks for the advice

[boostn0199]

ohhhh that doesnt sound good if you were cranking it with the belt skipping very possible had some impact there, hopefully you got really like and dodged a bullet.