Self-Destructive Behavior!

I have a problem with my '96 Taurus GL(duh), and I need some insight. The camshaft synchronizer disintegrated while driving without any indication of breakdown or trouble and took the camshaft sensor with it. There is nothing in the synchronizer now but debris. The engine has about 124,000 miles on it, and ran good prior. Can anyone tell me how this sort of thing can happen, and how to prevent it? Obviously the synchro has to be replaced, but I want to determine that I'm not going to simply create another such failure w/o knowing the cause.

My experience with this problem was that the sensor magnet broke off and fell into the rotating vane, causing the vane to bend over. Based on this and other bullboards CPS problems happen fairly often. Mine broke at about 75,000 miles. I do not know if you can prevent it from happening again.

The parts alone cost about $200. I was fortunate that the vane in the synchronizer was still in place, though deformed, so I could replace it without going through the time-consuming and special-tool-requiring alignment procedure. I could record the relative position of the vane to the synchronizer body (before removing it from the engine) and transfer that info to the new replacement part before I inserted it into the engine block.

Even though I had my engine light on because of this problem, I did not encounter any performance problems. The system may go into some sort of default mode when thare are no pulses coming from the sensor.