The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Engine Shop My 235 revved, died, won't start, and no coil fire or rotor spin.

This is not the end of the world. Don't sell the truck and don't take the engine out and take it to a shop.

I have pulled and replaced aluminum timing gears for the purpose of installing offset keys without pulling the cam out of the engine. If you get the aluminum gear good and hot and use oven mitts and are quick about it you should not have to bang on anything.

BUT

Since the gear failed with the engine running, a crank counterweight (or maybe its a rod, I forget which) likely wiped out a cam lobe. The clearances are that tight. The cam must be timed with the crank for the cam lobes to miss the crank. If it didn't catch a cam lobe, you just got lucky. You can check by pulling all the lifters and watching the cam go round and round through the lifter bores. This is less work than pulling the grill on a rusty AD. Don't know about a Task Force.

You might get lucky in the bent valve department too because when the gear starts to strip, the valve timing retards enough that the intake valves will start opening with the piston well into the down stroke and it will quit running altogether shortly thereafter. The exhaust valves are not a problem. When this happened to me it did no valve damage but I had to replace the cam.

BTW

There is a separate part number for timing gears for trucks vs cars. The truck ones are aluminum, the car ones are fiber, which run quieter. Don't replace the fiber gear with another fiber gear. Get an aluminum one. Fiber ones fail in trucks. Of course, use Hot Rod's method of checking for oil flow to the gear. Also, pull the pan and clean all the shreaded gear pieces out of the oil pump pickup screen and anywhere else you find them.

Make sure you get the timing marks lined up properly because you don't get a second chance after the gear cools. IF the timing marks aren't lined up you'll have to get out your puller and start over. Also, when you change the crank gear make sure not to get it on backwards with the timing marks on the back. I did this on an IH inline six one time and horror of horrors, the bolt holes for pulling the gear were blind and with the gear on backwards there was no way to get it off.