Hi, I’m Mike from 1A Auto. We’ve been selling auto parts for over 30 years!
Remove the belt cover here. Spray some rust penetrant on this bolt and nut, and a little bit on this nut, a little bit on this bolt here. Use a 10 millimeter socket extension and ratchet and remove this one. And remove this one here. Take the nut off and remove this cover. Just pull it off. It does have the throttle cable and the cruise control cable clipped to it. Pull it up and unclip it. It pulls straight up. Normally, that's clipped in there. Just over time, it's gotten old and cracked, so the clip came right out. We're going to flip this over and push that one out. And we can just put this aside.
This particular vehicle doesn't use an auto-tensioner for the belts. It has two separate drive belts, both with manual tensioners. So you need to adjust these and set your belt tension, and the same for the other one down here that runs the air conditioning pulley. And these belts feel fairly tight, but they are squealing. And you can typically, the belts do stretch over time, you could try to readjust them. But these are looking pretty worn. They've got a lot of rust staining on them, and basically every time you start the car when it's cold, they squeal really loudly. And once they start to squeal, they're kind of ruined. We'll replace them with new belts from 1A Auto, and re-tension them. And we'll have brand new belts.
So we need to loosen the alternator bolt. Spray some rust penetrant on her. Bolt goes all the way through. 12 millimeter bolts. Get it loose and we can loosen the tensioner. The tensioner here has two bolts, one to set the tension, and then one under here to lock it in place on the bracket. You don't need to fully remove it, so just loosen the locking bolt underneath before you try to release the tensioner, or else it's not going to move on you, and you could break this bracket.
Loosen this bolt using 12 millimeter socket extension and ratchet. You don't have to take it all the way out, just get it loose. It goes all the way through into the alternator. That should be good enough. It's still tension. Now I can loosen this. Make sure that before you loosen the tensioner bolts, or attempt to loosen the tensioner bolts, that you loosen the alternator bolt. It should make it easier to turn, because it's not trying to push against the alternator.
Even still, after doing this, our tensioner bolt broke because it was frozen into the little bracket piece that is bolted into the alternator. So just make sure that you have an extra bolt on hand if your vehicle is very rusty. It might break. Tensioner loose can push the alternator down. Pull the belt right off. I'll slide it in between here. You can see some wear. It's kind of worn smooth. The outside's pretty rough.
If you just want to replace the alternator power steering belt, you can stop here. But to replace the air conditioning belt, you do need to take off this belt first. So now we can take off the air conditioning belt. I'm going to use some break parts cleaner, clean the pulleys off, any of the rust penetrant I sprayed on there. There's little bits of rubber here that are stuck inside of the pulley that have worn off from the belt. You can use a wire brush to break them free and clean them out of there. Go around the pulley. If you have access to compressed air, you can also blow off the pulley. Install the alternator and power steering pump pulley. Let's get this down in here. Feed it down in front of the engine. Down around the pulley. Make sure it's seated.
The alternator is loose. I can push this down. Go around the power steering pump. All right, so it popped off the crank pulley. That's going to be the trickiest part is getting it to stay on the crank pulley. I'm going to do the alternator last. Although, if you have to, you can slide it up over the alternator. Clearance is tight, but you can get in here. And sometimes, if you make sure it's all the way on one of these other pulleys, it will flip down over the crank. Don't want to use a pry bar to put these on, to pry the belt on, you can ruin the belt.
Got my hand down here—I'm going to hold it near the crank pulley, and then I'm going to pop it off the top of the alternator pulley. I'm going to slide it over the crank pulley. I can see it's still over the power steering pump pulley. Push the alternator down a bit and kind of work it on. The alternator doesn't go down far enough. You can loosen this bolt up. Push it down a little bit more. That is at the bottom of the bracket. Oh, see it popped out of the power steering pump bracket pulley. Because if it's not fully seated on the pulley, it's not going to have enough give. And this is good that the belt is nice and tight, because it starts out nice and tight. So you just kind of work it over. There it is. So wasn't quite seated in the crank pulley. Give me a little tension trying to put it over the alternator pulley.
But now I can see it's in all of the pulleys. It's seated nice and even. Now we can start to tension this back up. You can actually pull this up a bit by hand. And so I don't have to thread this forever, I'm going to thread it down by hand. Tighten this up. Again, I'm going to do that by feel. Couple more. It's the same specification with about 22 foot-pounds of force. It should be a deflection of seven to nine millimeters. I think I'm happy with that right there. Now I've got the belt tensioned. Going to lock our tensioner in place. This is 16 foot-pounds. I will do it by feel. Don't over-tighten it, because you don't want to break the ear on the alternator. It’s tight. I will stop.
And the final step will lock the alternator in place now. So re-tighten this bolt here with a socket extension. This bracket needs to go straight up and down. Feel that get tight and I'll stop. Can start the car to check the tension and readjust if necessary. Going to reinstall the plastic cover. It's got this little plastic part that's going to sit in this rubber mount. Push down into place. Also, feed it over this stud that's over here. Reinstall the screw, reinstall the nut. Reinstall this bolt here. Clip our throttle cable, cruise control cable's back in. Some later vehicles might not have these.
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