How to Replace Serpentine Belt Tensioner 1997-98 Chevy Venture

Brought to you by 1AAuto.com, your source for quality auto replacement parts and the bets service on the internet. 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 this Chevy Venture and this tensioner fits a whole bunch of different vehicles. If you have a different GM vehicle, it's going to be the same idea of how your belt is routed and some things might be a little different. Tools you'll need on this vehicle are a 3/8 ratchet and a 15 millimeter socket. You can see, we're looking down at the top of our engine. One big thing is you want to always find your drive belt routing diagram here first and just kind of get the feeling of how this translate to what you're looking at far as the belt goes. Here, we're looking at this part of the belt when we're looking right here. That means that there's more belt that runs down underneath here. As far as getting the belt off, it's pretty simple actually. You cans see further down, I'll put to it without getting in the way here. This is your belt tensioner. The belt tensioner has a square hole in it which is the size of a 3/8 ratchet drive. You want to put the 3/8 drive handle there. Then you want to push on the handle, grab your belt, push it off that pulley there then you can your tensioner back.

Now, you can just basically grab your belt and take it off the alternator which is back in there. We'll basically kind of put it off the different components here. Put it down there all the way down. Take the AC pulley and pull your belt right out. To remove your belt tensioner. You want a 15 millimeter socket on your ratchet. There's a bolt right in the middle of the tensioner. I've got the ratchet on there. Remove that bolt. Your tensioner comes right up and out. Pretty simple. Since the one on this vehicle is actually in good shape so I'm just going to reinstall it. It does have a locating pin right here. When you put it down in there, sorry about the head getting in the way, you probably can see down in there possibly and there's the hole. You can just kind of twist the tensioner back and forth a little bit and feel the hole that it should go into. Actually now you can't really see what I'm doing. There's really no space to be able to film it. There's obviously the hole that bolt goes in and then behind it in relation to the vehicle is the smaller hole where that pin I showed you goes in. You get those lined up and I'm just fast forwarding through here getting that bolt on, tightening it with a wrench a little bit. It's really not that difficult of a repair especially if you knew exactly what you're doing. In this bolt, you want it to be tight, I would say probably about 35, 40 foot pounds. You got to pull it nice and tight with this wrench. In this belt here, according to the routing diagram, what you want to do is probably fit it between your tensioner and your crank pulley first and then get it down around the AC compressor.

There's really no way I can film that. We can move forward I guess. I'm kind of using my hand to flip it between, there's a tight space between the tensioner and the crank pulley. I've got it down an around the crank pulley now. I'm just using my hand. I'll probably get a good shot at the back of my neck there. Just feed it down, get it around the AC compressor pulley. All right, at this I basically got it around my tensioner, around my AC compressor pulley. What I need to do is take it and go back and around my alternator. Then you could see it's basically routed but it's just basically routed just kind of sitting here waiting to get onto this pulley. I take my 3/8 ratchet again and push my tensioner back and this hand grab the belt. Put it on there. Make sure it's also down and around my car steering pulley. It's all on. There we go. I can look down. It's on my AC compressor correctly. Feel down on my crack pull correctly and back here it's on my alternator pulley correctly.

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