Just had a new belt installed at garage, and 2 days later it broke.......I assume it was on too tight.
Could someone please tell me how to install the belt on a 95 maxima.
I would hope I don't have to remove altenator or any pulleys.
thanks
I'm working from memory here...
There's that 3-inch long thingie from the top of the engine bay that unscrews and releases tension on the serpentine belt (looks like a verticle pipe about an inch thick), but before that you have to loosen the bolt in the idler pulley. And the real trick is to take the tire off to get access to all this, and DON'T GET UNDER THE CAR without proper jack stands.
And if you mean the power steering belt, you actually "tighten clockwise" to loosen the belt, opposite of what you'd think, and there's also another little bolt that has to be loosened first (the normal way). That bolt is a little hard to spot at first, but keep looking. As I recall, it is nearest to the firewall.
All this took an hour and a half when I did it, because access is something of a pain, literally. Some folks claim to do this in just a few minutes, I assume with practice and better tools.
No, never mind. All this shouldn't matter because you should go back to the shop. You better hope that the belt was defective, because if it had so much torque on it that it broke, then your pulley bearings got a real workout.
broke.......I
I don't think you have a "tensioner" in the sense that a spring- loaded, pre-determined amount of torque is applied as in some other cars. The slack is manually taken up during installation of the belt, by rotating the adjuster that looks something like a pipe. The idler pully has a bolt in it that locks down this position once set.
If you have this setup, like my '96 did (same generation), all the idler does is spin freely on one axis (through the center of the idler) once it is bolted tight. It sounds like they're saying it froze. Funny they didn't notice it had a problem such that it would break two days later. They usually start making a screeching noise you can hear a block away. If it stopped turning on its axis, then they should show you the old part to back up the story. It probably would have eventually broken or thrown the belt if this happened.
I did install the belt pulley and everything seems ok thus far.
What I am puzzled about is I did request the old part back, and the old part does not look like the new pulley I installed. Secondly, on the old part the pulley is moving freely.....so I question how this caused my belt to break.
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The OEM idler is about 2 1/2 inches in diameter with a bolt going through the center of it. It's painted black. It doesn't look very fancy for what it costs. If they didn't return something like that to you, then it "sounds like" they found something in the corner of their shop to play show-and-tell.
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