So I recently started to get some oil leakage around my camshaft seals and decided that it's time to replace my timing belt. While looking at the oil leakage, I noticed a hairline crack in the harmonic balancer rubber. I've read horror stories of these things giving out but at the same time, I'm not exactly jumping at the opportunity of spending $200+ dollars on another component for this job. How bad is this and should I absolutely replace this or can I just pretend that I never saw it and worry about it in another 60K to 90K miles?

Oh its a 2004 with 312,000 miles

 

I'd change it out if your able to, I overlooked this in the past and it sperated and came off while my wife was driving home from work. Luckily she was right down the road from home and wasn't driving very fast when it happened. It could have been a lot worse.

 

Why don't you just buy a whole new engine and swap it in? At 300k miles, I'm sure a lot of other components are wearing off on the car. Used lower mileage engines are $500-1000.