Timing belt OEM FORD or OEM Volvo

All I can say is that the belt in this picture is 1000x better and will probably last longer than any non Volvo OEM pieces of garbage you’d buy off the jungle sales app. Heck those might not even get you back home.

it's usually the plan with all my cars until repairs become more expensive than payments. our last car was an 2006 vw jetta tdi. sold it a few years ago (18 years old). it was still running fine-ish but a lot of things were coming up. timing belt and water pump, suspension overhaul, wheel bearings, brakes and caliper rebuild, and it was getting quite a bit of rust all around. it would have lasted and gone for 5+ more years but with 2 young kids getting into sports and stuff and the winter weather we are getting in our new home, it was a smart move to get a truck. with the aluminum body and ease of getting parts for the truck for maintenance as well as the f150 and coyote community, keeping the truck running for a long time should be easy.

I bought the same 2012 S60 but a T5 for $5000 in August with 124k miles. It was a single owner vehicle with great maintenance records and my mechanic gave it a once over. I had to replace the timing belt and will probably need to replace the AC compressor next summer. I expect you'll need to do the timing belt too, and maybe some other things noted in the service manual, but even with $4k of work, you'll be well below your budget. I honestly smile every time I drive it, it's a blast.

I have had to replace timing belts in two of my cars. One was a Volvo V40 and the other a Honda Accord.

The OEM Ford belt I replaced in a 1992 Escort looked better than that when I did it a year ago. Quality matters.

As the title says, I changed my timing belt today. I replaced the timing belt, tensioner, idler pulley, serpentine belt, and serpentine belt tensioner. All replacement parts were OEM Volvo. There are two noteworthy cracks that go all the way across the belt and tiny cracks all over.

Pretty much all the newer Ford 4 and 3 cyl crap-box engines have what's called a wet belt for the timing. It's inside the engine as opposed to external like any sane normal or any moderately intelligent person would engineer.

Because of this, they require a VERY specific grade of oil, usually 0w-20 or 5w-20 full synthetic. If the wrong oil is used the belt will start to degrade and shred itself, this then starts plugging the oil pump pickup with rubber debris and starves the engine for oil. Or it just outright shreds and snaps, like yours did.

Bare in mind that this car uses a "wet belt" timing belt, where the timing belt runs inside the engine within the oil. This means that unless oil changes are carried out frequently, small parts of the belt break off and clock up the oil pickups, starving the engine and killing it.

Regardless of servicing etc, that wet belt is still deteriorating as it is soaked in the hot engine oil.

If it has been done they are actually a good engine when working fine. Plenty of torque and good on fuel. It’s just the reliability of them that’s the major issue. They switched to a timing chain from the wet belt from 2018 for a good reason. The 1.2 turbo engines from PSA are also wet belts and also switched to a chain around 2023. They are a terrible design and simply not going to be economical to maintain properly as the car ages.