Got the car in to be seen to today. It turns out that a retainer which held a valve-lifter roller bearing in place had broken, which allowed the bearing to turn sideways and the camshaft lobe to scrub the bearing surface flat, instead of rolling as it should. (Think about how your tires would wear flat if you drove around with the parking brakes set and locked. That’s about what happened to the bearing.) About the only good part of it was that the malfunctioning bearing didn’t wear away its matching lobe on the camshaft, so I didn’t have to buy a whole new camshaft.
Total damage: $170. And the car has stopped making the sewing-machine kind of noise that the bad bearing caused.
Jimmy Hoffa replaces the avenging crystal with a cast-iron whip. Fnord.
