So my girlfriend broke the timing belt on her ZX2. $170 later, the mechanic tells her she has a bent valve because cylinder #2 doesn't get any compression. I know this is crap, because the Zetec is non-interference. On closer inspection, I discover that the gear for the exhaust cam spins freely, several times around without catching anything. In the junkyard, all the VCT gears I turned would catch almost immediately. Is hers broken? The #2 cylinder has the exhaust valves held down by the cam, which would explain the no-compression thing to me.

If that is the problem, the second question is "how the shit do you remove the exhaust cam"? I couldn't, for the life of me, get that gear off. I got the star-bit cap thing off of the end, but ruined an allen wrench trying to hold the cam in place to undo that bolt that runs through the middle. I'm not going to do a VCT delete on her car for this ...

I can send you my old vct gear out if you need it.

You take a open end wrench just back from the vct and put it on the flat spots. Then get the bit that goes in the end of the oil bolt. It is not a allen. It is a torx. Get the right tool

So you're saying my assessment of VCT being broken is correct? I can (probably) get a VCT gear from a local junkyard. I already predict problems since the VCT cam gear freewheels :(

vct should spin freely. It should not spin freely with the engine started. I can almost bet he didn't align the cams right, can you get any pics of the cams?
does the car run in its current state?
car ran fine before mishap?

also if she broke a timing belt , probally time for new timing belt tension, pulley and crank gear.

yr/mileage?

We've tried cranking the motor over for several seconds, and it doesn't seem to change the pressure behind the gear. It spins a lot more freely than all the gears at the junkyard were -- none of those would spin more than about 60 degrees, and it was an increasing fight the whole way until the cam finally bit down.

The #2 cylinder has the exhaust valves down. I don't remember the intake cam. The mechanic said #2 didn't have compression though -- and after seeing the VCT gear freewheel like that, and seeing the valves held down -- it's my belief that the motor wasn't able to spin the cam, rather than a valve being bent. Unfortunately, the mechanic took the belt back off, so I can't test that theory. The car ran fine before the belt broke, but Ashley said it got "sputtery" a day or so before it broke, and the car threw a CEL for something like "upper O2 not reading values properly" (paraphrased). She said it would gain power back at the higher RPMS -- it sounded to me like one of the cams jumped a tooth. The belt broke as the car downshifted to go up a hill.

It's a 2000, with a rough life. It's already had a new flex plate installed, because she somehow broke that too ... it has 113,000 miles.