No good deed goes unpunished…. Timing belt saga

I also can’t picture how an improperly sized rubber belt didn’t snap before somehow reducing clearances of metal parts so they could connect when they shouldn’t be able to. Sounds suspect.

 

There is no way the belt caused a bent valve.

I have popped two timing belts on my 1997 now in the course of 260k miles. First one was killed by the water pump siezing up at around 133k, and the second was at highway speed around 230k.

Truck fired right up after I replaced the belts both times.

The second water pump gave me some grief though as it came with the tiniest of oring style gasket. Leaked all over the place. Pulled it back apart and used "form a gasket" like it came from the manufacturer originally.

 

Little Google-fu tells me that there are rare cases when a non-interference engine can bend a valve, usually when there's a lot of carbon build up that eliminates the clearance that would normally be there to prevent it. Dunno if that's what happened here