All this dire gloom as I may have said before about cambelts nags at me. In Manila everyone is banned from driving one day a week between Monday and Friday based on the last number on the license plate. The authorities here being at least as intelligent as the UK ones appear to be(!) assume in their wisdom this will reduce the appalling traffic. Of course what happens is, because there is no public transport system worthy of the name, the average professional family simply buys a cheap third car with a license plate that differs from the other cars in the family, so nobody gets denied transport, and the problem is exacerbated with yet more vehicles on the road.
THe obvious result is that the poor old hack car gets much abuse and not much attention. On this basis we've had a little 1994 Mazda 323 floating around for many years. It has been an excellent little car and lives up to the blurb in HJ's description of it. Today it was my turn to use it and I see it is nudging 60k km. Say 40k miles. Does this one need a cambelt and if so should it be changed? I don't have a manual and the Mazda agents didn't know what I was talking about on the phone. Advice please and thanks in advance.
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You don't say the engine size but given that it is used as atown 'hack' I would recommend replacement as a priority. It is one of the easier ones to do.
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Cam belt life would be best measured in engine running hours rather than miles or age. Wonder whether an engine hours recorder would be practical on modern cars?
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Thank you folks. I hope I can it to the shop before the motor falls to bits.
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Phil
Absolutely no reason why not.
All marine and aircraft engines are serviced on the basis of running hours.
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Hi,
Pretty well all small Mazdas are recommended for cambelt change at 60,000 miles, but in view of the fact that the car is already 7 years old I agree with my colleague Andrew Moorey - change it PDQ.
Regards, Adam
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Guys
To some extent the 'hours or miles' argument probably is less significant than duty. Aircraft have a well defined duty cycle, with maintenance intervals usually defined in 'equivalent hours'. Essentially this takes account of flght hours plus number of take off and landing episodes etc. Engines are maintained on the same basis. Essentially normal operation or flight hours count on an hour by hour basis, but the stress of a take off or landing counts as a fixed number of 'equivalent hours'. For a gas turbine, a start might equal 10 or 20 hours of normal runing.
So, an aircraft on short hops gets maintained more often, as should cars subject to short runs and cold starts. Cars with service indicators eg BMW work on this sort of basis. I guess the Growlers Mazda has certainly clocked up a lot of equivalent hours in Manila's traffic. It's likely that stop start motoring with frequent torque reversals as the engine accellerates and decelerates prorbably stresses the cambelt more than steady speed, and I've been told more fail at low speeds than high because of this.
So yes, get it changed.
Regards
JS
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age on its own will kill a cam belt...
even on a lightly used car 3 years is a safe max
same goes for tyres, spare tyre never used at 10 years old is probably suffering from perishing symptoms
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Excellent point Crazed Idiot.
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