EADERS might recall that about four months ago I put together a 300Tdi engine using a bottom end bought cheaply off the internet and the remains of another engine bought far too expensively by one of my customers. The resulting mongrel ran much better than it had any right to: I was happy, and my customer was happy, until one Sunday afternoon I had a message to say that the engine had stopped dead, and that the valve rockers were no longer moving when it was turned over on the starter. It sounded very much as though the cambelt had broken, unlikely though that seemed on an engine that had only done a couple of thousand miles. New parts do fail sometimes, and my best guess at this point was that either the belt tensioner
