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)
