My timing belt or coil? I hope it is a coil.

My teg broke down on the freeway about two weeks ago and I am now getting brought to a machanic and at first the machanic was telling me it was probably the coil in the distributer that needed to be replaced, but now he is saying it is probably the timing belt.
What happened with my car was it broke down on the freeway in slow traffic. It wouldn’t start after that, it kept trying to turn over but wasn’t really catching anything. It almost cought a few times but never really did.
If you think you know what it is please tell me, although I know theres not much I can do about it, but I dont want to have to pay for a timing belt to be put in since I don’t have the tools to take out my whole engine.
All replies are appreciated.

Couldn’t really tell you what it would be, but it would be easy to find out. Take your valve cover off (just a few 10mm nuts) and see if the timing belt’s still on.

And even if it is your timing belt, you don’t have to take the engine out to fix it… You do have to support the engine with a jack and take apart the driver’s side mount, but that’s not too bad. Hardest part is getting the crankshaft pulley bolt out, but do a search on here and you’ll find tons of tips for getting that thing off!

Good luck!

Forgot to mention… if it IS your timing belt and you end up replacing it yourself, do a compression test as soon as you put it in, to make sure there’s no internal damage on the engine. If it was in slow traffic, you may have gotten off pretty easily!

the same thing happen to me with my first integra my timing belt broke while i was in the drive thru at KFC(embarrassing). The car wasn’t moving so i thought it could be fixed easily. 2 years later the whole engine went and it was because of the timing belt. you have to make sure whoever puts on the timing belt knows what they are doing, no matter how slow you were going if the timing belt broke damage was done no matter how minimal. hondas are precision tuned and if 1 thing isn’t right the rest of the engine is sure to follow, i learned that the hard way. how many miles are on your car? over 90k should have had the timing belt done already.

I thought that even if your at an idle, if your not belt fails, there enough engine momentum for a piston to bend a valve. Although if you put a new t-belt on and you got lucky, everything might seem ok…or something would happen later.

The way you are saying it like" it wants to grab" sounds like the coil. Happened to me. Coil dissolved to nothing. $90 from the dealer. $66 from Autozone. I went OEM for $90. Peace of mind if you ask me. Hell it lasted 12 years. Maybe another 12 won’t be hard on the next one.