My wife's '89 245 died on the interstate Friday, about 1/2 mile from home.
Just lost power. She was able to pull over to the shoulder. Would not restarr.

After testing on the side of the road by me, and about 1.5 hours testing the next day in a shop by a couple good brickster specialists, we finally found that the timing belt had jumped 3 cog teeth, but was intact. The rear timing belt cover had disintegrated substantially in spots, and the front upper cover also had some damage. Apparently the broken pieces got caught up in the works and made the belt jump the teeth.

Oh yes - one of my mechanic friends who helped is Aye Roll, formerly a frequent poster on this board. Thanks, Rob!

Moral of the story? If a timing belt cover piece is somewhat damaged, replace it. Don't wait for it to come apart and thus mess up your cam shaft timing.

Friday night, I went to the lame car when I got back from work.
I suspected a broken timing belt, as we'd bought it used about 2-1/2 years ago, 35K miles ago, with no repair history.

By looking in the oil filler cap and then bumping the engine, then looking in the filler cap again, I was able to verify that the timing belt was intact as the cams kept changing position. Nope, timing belt not busted.

Checked for spark by putting ign. coil wire end at the hood hinge, that way I could see the sparks from the seat when cranking. Nice sparks.

Sniffed the tailpipe. No smell of gas. I'd been doing a fair bit of cranking by now, too. Bad fuel pump or F.P. relay?? Bad computer??

I had 3 spare FP relays in the car (OK, that's overkill, but I've been harvesting parts and I toss them in the back. I'll clean the car up in the spring, maybe). No go with any of those installed.

Had it towed to my friend's shop.
There, on Saturday, we followed down every fuel/ignition path, in detail. Listened to the fuel pump with car up on a lift. Pump and filter both looked original, good candidates for failure. Tested fuel delivery by feeding it into a bucket. Looked kinda slow to the experienced eyes observing. Measured fuel pressure on a gauge. 40 psi, 35 when cranking, fine. Checked for spark, and changed the plugs (just on spec, I suppose). Swapped in two spare computers. No difference. Checked the On-Board Diagnostics - no fault codes. Measured fuel injector electrical pulses with some kind of whiz-bang tool that another (3rd) mechanic in the shop had. OK, maybe one injector would fail, but not all of them. So, not an injector problem. No specific problem found anywhere.

Finally we figured well, maybe the timing belt jumped a tooth. Let's look at it, anyway. They pulled the cover, started looking at cogs and alignment marks. Sure enough, off by 3 teeth. It took about 1.5 hours in the shop to get to this point.

When they got the complete cover off, they found the damage to the plastic. Also found that the radiator was leaking on the rear side, we put in a better one. Water pump looked good so we left it as-is. Put new front seals on the engine. Runs like a champ now.

Thank you, guys!
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Sven: '89 245, IPD sways, electric rad. fan conversion, 28+ mpg - auto tranny. 850 mi/week commute. '89 245 #2 (wifemobile). '90 244 (spare, runs).