Looks like I've got another thing on the menu for my shitbox.
Good news is that it stopped screaming after only a moment.
Bad news is that it wasn't even close to quiet.
Further bad news is that I live in an apartment complex.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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Stop being a sonic terrorist and replace your damn timing belt!
Seriously, cars require regular, preventative maintenance.
Almost all of this can be be done by yourself, with a decent toolset and maybe also with a floor jack (edit: and a drain pan/catch), by reading the manual, which you can find online if you don't have the paper copy.
If you do the regular maintenance, you will spare yourself from much costlier repairs in the future, and you will be much less likely to experience a critical failure, in a moment where you really cannot afford (metaphorically or monetarily) a critical failure.
We are gonna become Cuba, because the auto giants are never going to make affordable cars again, and gas is not going to get cheaper.
Please take care of your vintage shitbox.
As the other commenter said, it's one of the other belts not the timing belt. If the timing belt slips the engine dies in quick order. Far louder and with a great degree of violence.
This is the first time it's happened on my shitbox and funnily enough it's only 10k miles before when I planned to do all the belts (My car has 4 belts including timing). I do them every 60k miles as a preventative measure primarily because I have to remove all of them to get to the timing belt, and since I'm in the I might as well swap them too.
I work on all my cars myself I just have to do it on the side of the road because I'm not supposed to work on my car on the property other than inflating as tire, checking fluids, or jumping the car.
At this point both of my cars are almost at the distance from the Earth to the moon in terms of the odometer and I'm gonna do my best to get them to the distance of there and back again at least. My plan is to fix them until I can't anymore, and given my skill set that's gonna be purely a parts availability thing likely caused by the windows at some point.
Good.
No notes, you're doing it right.
Apologies for my misplaced curmudgeonry, I'm very much more used to uh... the exact opposite kind of car care pattern as you have, in any random internet poster.
No worries, one of my neighbors is of the "neglect the car until it violently dies" category of car owner. His car SCREAMS the whole time It's running, the brakes SCREAM the moment any pressure is applied, it leaves oil spots everywhere he parks it, and on and on.
He won't fix it, won't have someone else fix it, he just keeps driving it.
It's sad to see him kill that care with his lack of care.
Boo that man!
This is gonna be the kind of person whose brakes fail 'for no apparent reason' and then he seriously injures or kills himself or others.
*Serpentine belt. If it were a timing belt it would be much worse than a noise. This usually is a pretty easy thing to replace in most cars.