The other night my daughter was taking her '83 wagon into Raleigh (35 miles) and noticed a funny sound and a sudden weakening of power, but not too bad. Car still was doing OK and since the car is a tank she figured that if it doesn't die its okay. She's smart but still blond. Four hours later on her way home around midnight we get a call that she has pulled into a Sheetz station because the car almost lost all power and "acting funny." The temp gauge is showing normal. She parks and it dies. She quickly goes out and opens the hood and the exhaust manifold is bright red. I hear this and I just knew the car was a goner. I drive over there and shes in the back seat playing her mandolin. Why worry, daddy will fix it. I figure it will never start again. But it did, right there, amazingly enough. I drove it around the parking lot and figured it was too weak to drive it home. I towed it back home the next morning. It had to be the catalytic was clogged and all that heat and gases and such had just built up in there with no place to go getting hotter and hotter. Nope. Perhaps a bad fuel pressure regulator was dumping fuel in there. Nope. Welll, maybe a clogged muffer or resonator. Took that off and cranked up the engine and woke up my geriatric neighbors from there summer naps. Seemed like plenty of power pressure coming out of the header. I then went and looked under the hood and all the pulleys (fan and water pump, alternator, power steering pump) were barely turning and then stopping and turning some more. The crank shaft was turning, but not the pulleys. It ran for two minutes like this and getting real hot with no coolant circulating. I stopped the engine, reached down and turned everything by hand real easy. Yep, you guessed it. The little soft metal "key" in the lower crank/timing belt pulley had stripped out and the crankshaft was turning freely inside the pulley. (Which I had seen this BEFORE taking that exhaust system off!) Therefore the water pump was not pumping, the alternator poorly charging, and the power steering seemed not so powered. Naturally the car got hotter and hotter because the engine was running hard at 65 mph on US 1. In fact that lower pulley for the timing belt got so hot from the friction of the crankshaft that it cracked. Obviously the timing was shot and the car lost power and overheated. On top of all this the temp gauge in the car was still showing normal or less. WHY IS THAT?? Any ideas? Anyway, I dodged a bullet, found the crank/timing pulley on my parts car, saved $150 for that, timed it up, and she runs great again. No oil leaks either. Durable. That's the word for these engines. It also helps that I treated the engine recently with an expensive new friction reducing compound that I thought I would gamble on. I think it helped. Normally I wouldn't try such stuff, but glad I did. I am glad Volvo made that key to strip like that thereby forcing the car to shut down before awful damage is done. I will likely need a new oxy sensor cuz the old one is probably burned up. Does the temp gauge not working mean some sensor is out? I can't remember which one connects to that gauge and where it is. Any input is always welcome. In her defense, I do know that my blondie daughter would have pulled over much sooner if the temp gauge had worked. She's pretty good about that ... usually. Anyway, a long story and a new experience I thought would be interesting to bricksters.