And Other Pet Peeves.
As you may have noticed, I happen to own an Olds 88 Royale with the vin K engine. Besides the magically melting intake manifold, there are a couple of other little gripes about this car without even resorting to irrepairable oil leaks. Fortunately, there’s workarounds for these too.
Why does this have to be the only vehicle I’ve ever owned without a belt routing diagram pasted under the hood somewhere? I swear this must be the only car sold without one somewhere. I forget every single time I have to do this because, thankfully, it isn’t often. So I made one. It’s a bit nonstandard. And my pulleys are lumpy. (Click it for a larger version.)
While we’re on the subject of the fan belt in this beast: Since when do you need to remove an engine mount to replace a common maintenance item like the fan belt? This must be another GM first. This gentleman has thoughtfully posted a means of doing this without the need for common GM maintenance tools (e.g. an engine lift) and while I do appreciate his method, I prefer brute force.
The first time I did this particular job, I made a mess with the coolant drain plug located just below and to the left of the spacer that resides between the engine block and mount. This happened because I tried to avoid the hassle of removing the engine mount in a parking lot. Turns out, removing that bolt (plug, whatever) makes it very easy to pop the spacer back in and if you’re already changing out the coolant, isn’t such a bad way to go. On the other hand, if you’re stuck somewhere and don’t feel like making a mess, you might just do something like this:
The butt end of the breaker bar used to slacken the tensioner pulley worked rather well.
And if you don’t have a ‘reverse torx’ bit handy to remove the long bolt that goes through this spacer, well vise grips are usually floating in a toolbox nearby...... (I used one of these sockets, they do almost everything)
6 Comments:
Thanks for the help. I just did the belt on my '96 Bonneville. I was able to just take off the plastic cover and then the bolt and spacer. The bolt came out using my vise grips. The spacer was tight, but it came out and went back in using just my fingers. It took only about 1/2 hour.
I think the tightness of this particular piece may have something to do with the amount of flex in the mounts and where the motor is sitting. For reference, mine are hosed and the motor flexes them quite a bit when giving it throttle (you can see it lurch).
We found your link from the netcrafting.com guy's site after we had jacked up the motor and removed the passenger side motor mount with impact tools. In hind sight, I think maybe the better tool might have been an acetylene torch! I like your "blunt object" theory too BTW!
I agree with you as to why would these GM bonehead engineers not put a belt diagram somewhere for
the do it yourselfer. I had to replace my water pump on my 1997
lss olds and when the old water pump went the belt scrambled. I made the mistake of pulling the
PS pulley instead of loosening the
PS bolts and moving it aside. I found you guys websites too late
with the procedures on how to
install the belt. They must of put
the motor mount there as a last resort. Thanx for the info.
I always wondered what happened to the engineer who located the oil change plug on the 70's and 80's Ford pickups right above the "i" beams so oil would splatter everywhere during an oil change.
It appears by your descriptions he must have taken a position at GM on his next step up the corporate ladder.
I've got a 99 Grand prix, and they finally decided to relocate the mounts to the front, so luckily, i dont quite have this problem. However, the coolant bottle is slightly in the way when trying to reroute the belt onto the lower pulleys.
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