I took my wife's 05 Neon to the store and when I stated it up at the store I heard a steady thump sound on the passenger side of the car. It did not speed up when gave it more gas.
I went ahead and drove it the 5 miles home and when I turned into our driveway the car died, engine and oil light came on. It would not restart and checked the engine code and have a P0340 cam position sensor. I sounded like it had no compression so I pulled out one of the plugs and put a compression gauge on it and no compression. Could the timing belt have broke or slipped? This thing has 130K on on I was wondering if it is worth fixing or just to scarp the darn thing?

 

Sounds like the belt broke. There should be a plastic plug toward the top of the front timing belt cover you can remove to see if the belt's gone. If it did break you'll see the camshaft sprocket with no belt on it.
Whether it's worth fixing or not probably depends on the overall condition of the car and how much work you're willing to do to it yourself. If you can pull the head off and replace the bent valves yourself, you can do the job fairly cheap.

 

What richards83 said. I'm guessing the belt wasn't changed at 105,000 miles?

 

I do not see a belt when I remove the plug. Not sure if belt was ever changed. We bought it about 6 months ago used. I don't have a garage to work on my cars anymore so I will probably just scrap the car out and find something else.

 

Remove the camshaft sensor on the back of the cylinder head. And then have someone crank the engine over. Does the magnet turn on the end of the camshaft? If it doesn't, then you have a broken timing belt.

 

Sorry to hear that. The belt is probably laying down by the crankshaft. I wouldn't scrap it though. You can put it on CL and get much more than scrap value. There are plenty of people around like me who flip cars like that. An 05 still has plenty of value.

 

Master-Tech. Thanks for teaching me a very cool, something i would have never thought of...obvious trick. Lol. Seriously.

I agree with Richard. if you don't want to fix it put it up on CL. Especially if it has a great body.

 

That's what happens when you work with product for 25 years. You learn and share.