I thought I would run this by you all, it could happen to you.
I have a 94 Escort LX wagon with 70 K + on it. It belongs to my elderly mother, and I'm not around much to do the maintainence. I've been worried about the timing belt, but the manual lists no replacement mileage, so I breezed past 60 K thinking I was all right. It's a Florida car, but what happened was I was up north with it, and it got very cold very quickly overnight, and the serpentine belt shredded into three parts, with lots of banging. So I pulled over and removed most of the obvious pieces of the belt. I shut down all the electrics and started it again, and a another piece of that belt whipped around and snaked up into a gap between the timing belt cover and the block, and snapped the timing belt. If I had been more attentive, I could have crawled under the car and removed most if not all of the remaining shredded pieces before I tried starting it. Be forewarned.
When I tore it down, the timing belt was in very good shape (except for being catastrophically snapped). This is the first time I've done this job, so the questions I have are : the gears are quite a bit larger than the width of the belt, does it matter where exactly the timing belt should be centered on the gears? The old belt was slightly off center towards the block, but if it is off center one way or the other too much, could that cause premature or excessive wear on the new belt? I'm out in the boonies and I don't have proper access to my tools here, so how important is exact torque on the tensioner and pulley bolts? Can I estimate these things, or should I just go out a buy a cheap torque wrench?
Stupid questions I know, but I can't afford to have this happen again with my disabled mother in the car, when it's freezing cold out there, or on the wide open highway.
Just trying to dot my i and cross my t.