How to Replace Serpentine Belt 1996-98 Jeep Grand Cherokee

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Hi, I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1AAuto. I want to help you save time and money repairing and maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20 plus years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly, that's going to save you time and money. Thank you, and enjoy the video.

In this video we're going to show you how to replace the serpentine belt on a 93 to 98 Grand Cherokee with the 4.0L inline six. The tools you'll need are a 15 mm wrench and a 15 mm socket with a ratchet and extension.

Before you take off any serpentine belt, really what you want to do is find your belt routing diagram. You can see right here it's on the top of the radiator. Some cars it'll be up on the hood, something like that. This is very important. It shows you how the belt is routed. You want to look at it and look at your belt before you take it off, and just understand what it's telling you, what the different pulleys are, and how it's routed. It's very crucial in getting it back together correctly.

To do the serpentine belt on one of these Grand Cherokees, there are two bolts. There's one down in here which is the bolt right in the center of this pulley, right here. Then you have a tension or bolt right down here. You want to remove this sensor wire, and then the bolt is right there.

So we'll loosen up this pulley bolt first, 15 mm wrench. Just put it right in there. Just give it a couple of good turns. Now we'll use our 15 mm socket with our extension here, and I have an air ratchet. Obviously any ratchet will do. As I loosen this up, you'll see the belt loosen up. You can take the belt and peel it off your power steering pump.

So to put the belt back on, where I want to start is I want to loop the belt down around the crank shaft first. That's going to be the most difficult thing. I've got the fan that kind of gets in my way. So I'll make a loop and put it down in there.

I'm going to have to apologize here. My camera didn't get the next shot which is basically to take the belt off all the pulleys. The hardest part will be getting it down from around the crank pulley which is the lowest pulley. Once you get it off there, it kind of gets hung up on the fan a little bit. So you basically just kind of rotate the fan around and pull the belt up and out. Again, I didn't get a good shot of that. I'm not sure what happened. Once I realized it, I didn't have the vehicle any more to re-shoot it.

So to put the belt back on, where I want to start is I want to loop the belt down around the crank shaft first. That's going to be the most difficult thing. I've got the fan that kind of gets in my way. So I'll make a loop and put it down in there. I've got my belt. It's a little stiff. I've got a loop here. What I want to do is feed it down in. I want to put the loop over one of the fan blades because that's kind of how it comes out. Then I'm kind of rotating the fan down in, letting the belt go somewhat into place here. Actually my fan is kind of taking it for me. I used the fan to basically pull the belt down into place. Now I'm grabbing the top up over that goes between the fan pulley and the crank, and I'm trying to put it into place. I've got that. Now I'm grabbing the bottom end of the belt, making sure it's underneath the crank pulley. I've got that.

Now looking back at my belt, it comes up, over my tensioner, and around my power steering. I'm just kind of doing this for now. I might have to take some stuff back off. This part goes around my water pump which is my fan pulley. It looks like it goes around this. It goes up and over this idler pulley. It's just below my AC pump. Now I want to feed it down around my alternator. Something doesn't look right. It does not go over my idler pulley here. This comes down. It goes under the idler.

You can see I have the belt on around the AC, down around the alternator there. It's a little hard to see everywhere. You can see it's still not on my idler pulley. What you can do is here's your idler pulley bolt. You could actually take this by hand. If you have to use a wrench, just make sure that's as loose as you can get. Once you have your tensioner pulley, loosen up as much as possible. You can reach down in and flip the belt right on there.

Now that you've got the belt routed properly, you're going to take your 15 mm socket, ratchet, and extension, and start tightening up your tensioner. I'm just going to keep my thumb on here just to keep a note of the tension.

We've tightened up our tensioner. When you end, you want to have about a quarter of an inch of play. You see I've got a little bit more, but as I tighten this pulley bolt, some of that will go away. Now I'm going to tighten the pulley bolt up. That should end it with about a quarter of an inch of play right there which is what you want.

So then last but not least, take your sensor wire, plug it back in. Then start it up. Shut it off. Just check, careful of the fan. Just check your tension one more time after running it for a second.

We hope this helps you out. Brought to you by www.1AAuto.com, your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the internet.