Paranoid from what happened to my 968, I immediately set up an appointment to replace the timing belt on my wife's daily driver, the 1998 Nissan Pathfinder which we bought brand new, 11 years ago. The mfg suggested replacement interval for the timing belt is 105k miles, but no mention of years. However, I never got around to it, so it reached 126k miles and 11 years of daily spinning, in hot, in cold, in rain, in stop and go traffic, on highways, on streets, slow, fast (although hardly on any occasions at more than 90 mph.. ok, so one factor in its favor..) etc.
After being horrified at witnessing what my 968's timing belt looked like on 45k miles and less than six years ( dry, brittle, cracks everywhere, all teeth were a bit worn but otherwise ok, yet the integrity of the entire belt was just scary, in both appearance and feel ) I expected this 11 year old belt with triple the mileage on it to be nearly decomposed and a hair away from crumbling in my hand as I picked it up.
I keep hearing from everyone that rubber is rubber is rubber so ALL rubber parts have about a five years max life.. uhh, guess what ..not really !
The old Nissan belt was essentially indistinguishable from the new one they put in. I bent it in every way imaginable, inspected every bit of the top and the underside, twisting it over and over looking for the smallest sign of cracking in between the teeth, on the teeth themselves ( which had no visible wear ) thinking that this simply can't be..the rubber was as soft, as shiny and as felxible as any new belt they had in the shop with which I compared it. So I held it down with one foot, and started pulling as hard as I could thinking : I'll hear it start to tear any moment now - at this age even a 200 pound weakling like me can break it, right ? [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/dry.gif[/img] Not a chance. This thing was unbelievably resilient.
So now, pissed as can be for spending $ 900 for a job I clearly did not need, the insult added to injury was that the mechanic at this shop who works exclusively on Japanese cars indicated he has never even heard of a belt breaking on a car, much less fixing one in all the years he has been there.
That would explain my search on the Nissan forums turning up only one case of a timing belt failure... ever. And even that was hearsay.
So I asked the mechanic to check the old belt himself, and to give me an educated guess how many more miles I would have had on it. The reply: on the safe side, probably about a quarter million miles.. or likley another decade, whichever comes first.. great, he tells me this after I spent the money to do the replacement, like he could not advise me of the facts before ?!
Anyway, to the pint now : yeah, I get it - our belts are subjected to running at 4000-6000 rpm more often than not, and we have aluminum engines which expand a bit, and there's much more heat produced by the 968 engine than by a boring old Nissan, and all that contributes to the belt wearing out faster, yada, yada, yada.. but come on, we're not talking double the life of one belt over another, not even triple the life.. we're getting close to ridiculuos differences which can only be explained ( IMO ) by this : Porsche uses, and maybe deliberately, cheap materials and substandard fabrication in their parts.. considering the name on that badge, and the cost of these cars, that's just shameful, to say the least.
So talk about adding insult to injury...I have to spend a ton of money because of a piece of crap Porsche belt breaking at 45k miles only to discover that a Nissan OE belt ( which also costs about half of what Porsche charges for its belt ) is of far superior quality [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/mad.gif[/img] , and would have had a lifespan borderlining on infinity ( ok, we'll leave other japanese cars out of the discussion here [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink.gif[/img] ).
BTW, the Nissan belt looks significantly wider than ours. That might also make a difference in resistance to snapping, but certainly not in the resilience / flexibility where there was no comparison between the two belts' rubber compound feel and strength. Fine, I'll blame it on heat, and move on from my ranting to bigger and better things, but I just had to get this off my chest.
IMHO, "Porsche quality" is a joke. A joke at the consumer's expense, that is..
