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Originally posted by A Great Rossdawg Happened Here:
B.S. ... Cadillacs of those years, do they cylinders go straight up and down or are they tilted?

All Cadillacs back then were V-8, with slanted cylinders.

If such nuts were in the cylinders they would eventually bang the head of the block if they were straight but it would still turn over. If tilted it would make real bad grooves along the side wall and perhaps seize the piston if jammed right.

Cylinder head clearance is in thousandths of an inch, a one inch nut would stop rotation of the engine entirely the when the first one reached the top of its stroke.

In the second case, if all they had so much time on the conveyer belt to dump screws into cylinders which I doubt, that many screws would have totally ruined the timing and perhaps weakened the heads of the cylinders almost immediately. When you the car turned over after the screw removal, it would make so much noise anybody with the slightest mechanical knowledge would hear a major problem.

To remove these screws would at the least required cylinder head removal and any damage, and oh yes there would be damage, would be obvious at that time. I saw a Ford V8 torn down to find a knock. A carburetor screw was imbedded in a piston and was hitting the cylinder head on each stroke, but it still ran anyway, just made noise.

[B]In my Plymouth, the timing belt broke violently and a few pistons were totally damaged by this and as soon as the belt had been replaced and I started the ignition I knew immediately by the sound and idling that I would be shopping for a new car soon.[B]

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Once again,the cylinder head clearance varies with make, the only OHC engine I know of that could lose a belt and not damage anything was Chevy Vega back in the '70s. There may be others that have sufficient clearance between piston an valves, but I'm not sure.

Back to the subject at hand; either of these cases would require complicity on the part of factory workers and car transporter drivers to end up at the dealers in this condition. Back then not every engine was test run before installation like they are now, but they were started and driven off the end of the assembly line, into the factory parking lot and onto trucks or train cars.

Another rattle a dealership mechanic was trying to find turned out to be an empty glass Coke bottle inside the passenger side door.

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Originally posted by The Goes-hmmm of Xmas Past:
...the only OHC engine I know of that could lose a belt and not damage anything was Chevy Vega back in the '70s. There may be others that have sufficient clearance between piston an valves, but I'm not sure.

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Trivia fer ya:

All Volvo redblock engines from the Jurassic through about 1985 (B16, B18 and B20 pushrod, B21, B23 and B230 OHC) are non-interference engines. That means that the valves don't do the bump'n'grind with the pistons when the camshaft stops but the crank keeps chugging.

The notable exception is the B234, which has a hot 16-valve dual overhead camshaft head. Not only is it an interference design, but there are twice as many valves to bend and twice as many ways for the belt to break. Sheesh.

The later engines like in the Volvo 70 and 90 series cars are generally interference designs.

So far I've been parked twice by cam belt failures. One, I managed a getaway using the tools and spare belt in the trunk. The other, the belt broke because the camshaft had seized, and I got towed home. Both times, the belt was about 60000 miles older than its recommended change interval, so shame on me.

Snopes, perhaps someone had it in for someone at that dealership. If they made a practice of selling faulty Caddies, perhaps they deserved it.