I have a '95 TA, pretty much all stock. A month or so ago I was cruising through town and looked down, was shocked to find that I had no oil pressure. I got it shut off right away, and had to haul it home and try figure out what the problem was. It turned out that the gear that drives off the cam to run the oil pump drive had a bunch of teeth worn off and missing, to the point that it finally stopped turning at all. Has anyone ever seen this before, and why would it happen? Took the cam out and that gear is worn slightly, but doesn't look like it has any problems that should have caused the other gear to wear off. The motor has about 35k on it since a rebuild, and at that time I put a Summit rebuild kit in it, which included a new "high volume" oil pump of some kind. Could this pump be driving harder than the stock one and cause this problem? The teeth on the gear didn't just break, even the ones that are left are worn to the point that they are thin and sharp, and some of them finally broke off since they were so thin. This seems really odd, I don't want to just slap the motor back together with a new oil pump drive and have it happen again, I need to figure out why it happened. Just looking for your thoughts and experience on this.

 

I might be wrong but I though several cams had a choice of 2 materials the distributor gear was made from. If you get the wrong one it will do what you speak of. But I don't know which is which. Ask Rich Krause.

 

I know that some distributor gears are made of brass, but both the cam and the gear in my car are stock, I put them back in when I overhauled it 35k miles ago. It all looked fine then, at 70k miles, and now at 105k miles the gear is gone. There has to be some reason it did this.

 

A high volume pump is harder to turn...