The following Monday was a holiday. Tuesday I drove our 122S, and after work I picked up another handful of fuel filters, now installing a second one before the fuel pump (whatever the crud in the tank was, it couldn't be doing the pump's innards any good). Wednesday, I confidently started the 1800 for my short morning commute -- and immediately heard a new, unauthorized noise; a light clacking like a poorly adjusted valve. Marsha, who had come out to see me off, cocked her head in the direction of the hood, and then shook it grimly. I didn't want to be late and I'm stubborn in any case, so I drove off regardless. Fuel problems aside, the car was running great last time I turned it off -- what can happen sitting in a garage for a few days?

The noise got worse all six miles to work. Not only did it clack louder as the motor warmed up, but it developed buzzy, non-rhythmic characteristics. At lunch, I popped the valve cover: No bent pushrod, no cracking rocker, and what felt to my fingers like sensible lash all around. On the way home later, the noise again clacked lightly at first and repeated its morning performance exactly as the motor warmed. It was clearly best to drive it no further until this new problem -- whatever it turned out to be -- was fixed.

Now, I need to add a little context here. Marsha normally drives our VW Campmobile (the Volvo support vehicle), but she'd been complaining of poor performance lately. It had also several times died cold in parking lots and had only started again with difficulty. It won't fit under our garage door, so I'd been spending many afternoons standing around in the rain and poking around its engine compartment until darkness made me quit. I hadn't made much progress; in fact, it just got worse until we didn't dare drive it, even when it would start (VW buses don't normally go 140,000 miles on a motor, but ours has).

As Marsha was doing publishing work for an outfit 30 miles down the freeway, she began taking our 122S instead. The first time she did, its idle suddenly increased to near 4000 RPM, which made for an interesting drive in traffic. Coming home, the idle went to normal, but the throttle suddenly wouldn't open for a few minutes (this on the freeway in rush hour); then it worked again and got her home. If I was going to get soaked working on cars, I'd rather do it fixing a Volvo than a VW bus -- but I won't say I was pleased. It turned out to be wear in the throttle linkage on the Weber carb conversion. I was able to patch it up (I'd been wanting to lose the whole Weber thing for some time anyway), but it never was really right again. Then the overdrive went intermittent and the right windshield wiper -- which I was sure I'd fixed for good after several attempts -- went limp. We were now down to one operable car, and that one had problems.

Cameron suggested that all this was due to my offering insufficient praise to Uncle Olaf, patron deity of Volvos. Heck, I'd given him a nice, big web site, a magazine, and fifteen years driving and fixing his cars -- what more did he want, blood?

Our garage roof has big holes in it (one has an apple tree branch growing through it), but the garage's inside is still better than January's outside, so I now concentrated on making the 1800 run so the 122 could have its turn inside for some real maintenance. I eventually concluded that the noise was coming from the timing gear cover and performed a basic test: I could rock the crank pulley 20 degrees either way before the distributor rotor also changed direction. That was good news -- a simple timing gear replacement would put us back to having two cars on the road. The poor bus would just have to wait until we could afford a new motor.

Saturday unclub social at Phil's house... By the time Cam drove up, I had the 1800's radiator out and the timing gear cover off. The problem was obvious: The old fiber gear had separated from its metal hub and was wobbling all over. Good old Volvos! Even with such a vital component fatally injured, the old camshaft had kept spinning and had brought the car home under its own power (Uncle Olaf be praised).

I was a little concerned that we didn't have the regulation timing gear press tool available. The gear hub is an obstruction fit on the nose of the camshaft and any sort of hammering to get it started is strictly verboten; that will surely drive the cam back in the block and pop out the soft plug at its rear. There's no sensible way to replace the plug without pulling the motor. Fortunately, the new gear went on by hand far enough for us to get the threads of its retaining nut started, and the nut seemed to press it on without much fuss. Finish up with a torque wrench and voilá. With Shayne and Teague now also in attendance, reassembly went very quickly and we were ready to try it out.

The motor sprang to life on the first compression stroke; the smoothest-sounding B18 in the world. We all cheered. I pulled it out of the garage so we could set the ignition timing without breathing exhaust fumes, and fed in the choke as the first sliver of yellow ribbon showed on the temp gauge. It was then that I noticed the tiny little tapping noise. Everyone else heard it too, as the increasingly puzzled looks on their faces attested. After a few seconds, it had become a distinct clacking noise, although quite different from the one the disintegrating gear had been making. We stood around baffled. After a minute, it became a we better shut it down right this second before something comes flying out the side of the block noise, so we did. We retreated indoors (where it was much warmer) and pondered this new phenomenon while eating bowls of Marsha's excellent potato-leek soup. We change a timing gear and the motor immediately loses a rod bearing? What? The soup failed to make us smarter. We went back out, I started the car, clanked it backwards into the garage and shut it right down. The guys departed.

That evening, I fired off a detailed report by E-mail to the remote members of the VClassics crew. Each responded as expected. David wrote back, "What did you screw up?" (Not his exact terminology.) Lee commiserated and pointed out that it would be just too great a coincidence for the work we'd done to be unrelated to the new noise (the same thing David said, in other words). Mark just commiserated, which helped.