(2000 Camry CE) Piston Rod Broke!

[F360Spider]

I just got a 2000 Camry CE on Saturday and today while I was driving it to my school, one of my piston rods broke. (It's a V4 and it only has 52,000 miles on it.) It was fine driving it to my school and it wasn't making any unknown noises or sputtering or anything. When I got to my school I pulled my car over and then put in park. Almost as soon as I did that I heard a huge thud under the hood and my RPMs were immediately at 0. The engine temp looked fine but then I started to noice smoke coming in through my vents inside the car and then coming out from under the hood and underneith the car. I immediatly turned it off and ran. I noticed the smell from an earlier incident that it was transmission fluid that was burning. After I called 911 and the smoke was clear, (thank god the car didn't actually catch fire) 2 of the police offers and I opened the hood to find a HUGE-roughly 5 x 3 inch piece of the transmisson casing missing! I could look in the hood without toutching anything and see the gears inside the transmission! Plus there was a brown liquid leaking out of the car. I couldn't initally tell what it was. It seemed like oil but luckly my friend who knows a bunch about cars pulled up and put his finger in the liquid and felt it. He said it looked like oil but it seemed too thin and not right. My thoughts then is that no one ever changed the trans fluid which is the one thing i didn't check when I got it, and the trans fluid cooked so much it blew up. So I initally thought the trans blew. Then while I was in school my patrents had the car towed to a Toyota dealership where they had found a piston rod had actually broke and went through the engine block and made a huge gaping hole in the transmission while some of the metal debri also gashed an air conditioning hose and burst that too.

The car was previously used by an old lady who it would seem rarely drove it so it was in exellent condition for the price I brought it for. Which was from a lady my mom works with. (Her mother-in-law died and they needed to sell the car to pay the bills.) They had taken the car to the shop not too long before we bought it and everything checked out okay except the battery was a little weak (which I got replaced) and the timing belt needed replacing soon. (I have the actual paper from that shop visit.) But other than that everything was fine.

My question is what in the world would cause a piston rod to break like that with only 52k miles on the car?! I wasn't pushing the car on the way there or anything. It was just normal driving.

[Brian R.]

Might be:
You ran out of oil because of a leak
Blew a head gasket and leaked antifreeze into your oil

Might be sludge:
http://www.automotiveforums.com/vbul...49&postcount=1

Might be just a defective rod, rod cap, or bolt.

Did the shop replace anything besides the timing belt?

[F360Spider]

No the shop hadn't replaced it. That looked fine after the rod broke too. My inital thought was that that may have broken. But when I saw the smoke I knew I had a more serious problem.

I just got word last night from the dealership that they did not find enough engine sludge in the engine for something like a rod breaking to happen. So apparently I won't be getting a new engine or transmission free of charge. Luckily I have already gotten my money back for the car and I was even reimbursed for the $90 battery I bought to replace the weak one.

The interesting thing too is that after the car had gotten to the dealship I had learned that the brand new battery was fried as well. I'm thinking what may have happened to was my temperature gauge was not working properly and perhaps there was something wrong with my water pump. I know engines get very hot but after I lifted the hood on my car about 10 min after it broke it was so increadibly hot that I could not even put my hand in the engine to look around. I had also noticed the top of the wires to the alternator were melted as well. Not enough to expose the metal but the top plastic was clearly melted. That could explain the battery as well as a short somewhere but I really doubt that would cause a piston rod to break.

Alright well I got to go right now as I'm in school as I'm typing this.
I really appreciate your help man.

[Brian R.]

Definitely sounds like a coolant problem. Replacing the water pump is something commonly done during a timing belt replacement. By my question, I was trying to find out if anything other than the timing belt was touched so that you would be more informed about the possible problem that caused the overheating or oil loss.

The melted wires resulted from the overheated engine and the shorted wires killed the electrical system. They are a byproduct of the problem, not the cause.