Hey friends. It's Len at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2010 Nissan Altima. I'm going to be showing you a simple job replacing a serpentine belt. If you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com.
So removing this wheel we're going to use a 21 millimeter socket, we're going to go around and just loosen up all five of these lug nuts. We don't need to take them off all the way, and we don't want to loosen them up too much. We just want to break them free while the wheels are just barely on the ground, with a little bit of the weight of the vehicle, just so the wheel doesn't spin. I'm going to go ahead and turn them to the left. So now I'm going to continue with removing all the lug nuts. You can use something like an air gun if you wanted to, or continue with your ratchet. These are loose enough that I can do them by hand. I'm just going to remove all five of these. So last lug nut, I'm holding the wheel. Just going to set this out of the way. Move this right out of the way.
So we have the forward part of the bumper off for another video we're doing, but I'm just showing you what we're doing for this part, right. We've got the wheel off so we can get to this plastic shield right here. We're going to remove this and then we're going to come from up in under and we'll be able to see the tensioner and how the seep belt's ran under there. So I'm just going to go ahead and remove some of these push clips. Basically you pull the center out and then the outer side comes out with it. The center is the part that locks it in. So I'll just take these out. See if I can get this down and out of here. Come on baby. There we are. Now we have a view of the serpentine belt
So I'm going to be taking a 14 millimeter on my serpentine belt tool. I'm going to put it right on the tensioner bolt here. I'm going to try to turn this clockwise and get it re-ratcheted. There we go. It relieves pressure on this belt so now if I wanted to I could take the belt off, which I do want to. So I'm going to go like that. Here we are. I'm just going to get my tool out of here, okay. You can leave the belt in, take the belt out. We're going to be replacing it so I'm just going to take the whole belt out. If I wasn't replacing it I would probably just try to leave it on as many pulleys as I could, to be less work for me when I go to put it all back together. Let's see if I can pull it out. Here's our serpentine belt.
So one of the first things we do once we get the belt off, we're going to compare to our new belt. We want to make sure that the length is the same, the thickness is the same and the count of the ribs on the inside is the same, okay? So here we go. I'm just going to take both of them and lay them across one finger, bring my hand... straighten up the belt first. Sorry about that. Okay you got it on one finger there, one finger here, stretch them. They're about the same, it feels good. We'll just compare the thickness of the belt. As you can tell it's about the same thickness, wonderful. Then go like this. We'll count the ribs. I count six on each belt so it looks perfect. This belt should be great to install. Let's do it.
So we've got our serpentine belt, we've got our quick drawn belt routing here. Pretty easy. Alternator, water pump, power steering pump, tensioner, crank, AC, back up. I'm going to start up here so basically I'm just going to try to weasel my belt all the way up to the top, get it around that alternator pulley up at the top, try to make sure that it's inside all the grooves. I'm going to let it hang down and then I'm going to work it. I'm going to come down around here, around the water pump, over to the power steering, back around this way to the tensioner, crank, AC. It all should line up by the time I'm done. If you can't get this up over the alternator up top from down here, just pop the hood. Pop the hood, set it up from up there and then work it a different way. But this is the generalized what that it's going to have to go in the long run. You do you boo-boo.
So I'm going to go, I'm going to try to get this serpentine belt between all these pulleys. I'm going to use my pry bar try to work it. Hopefully this pry bar is long enough to get me above the alternator pulley. Here we are. I'm just going to push it on, okay. Water pump being a pain in the butt. Oh, as soon as I got it on it came right off. That's fun. Okay, here we go. So we're on the alternator up there. Now what do we got to do? We're going to come around that water pump. I don't want to lose the alternator up there, hopefully. Yeah okay. So it came back off. That's all right. We're going to do this a few times. If you're doing this on the ground you might find it easier just to come from the top and do this. At least get it over the alternator and then bring it down around everything.
Okay so we went alternator, water pump, we're bringing it around. We're going to come to the power steering pump pulley, which is this one right here, okay. Now I'm going to take it and go straight across the engine to our tensioner pulley right here, and go up and over the top of that. You can tell which way the belt goes generally because if it's a flat smooth pulley it goes on the backside of the belt. If it's a ribbed pulley, like that right there, obviously the ribs fit in there. It's pretty easy to figure that out. I'm going to bring this side down around the AC compressor pulley and there we go. Okay. So I'm just going to hold a little bit of tension on it with my hand. Nothing too crazy. I'm going to look up, see how everything looks. It likes like I'm on that AC up there. Sorry not the AC, the alternator. I'm on the AC down here. Power steering pump looks good. Okay.
So we're going to grab our tool with our 14 millimeter. Whether you're using a wrench or something like this with a socket on it. I'm going to turn it clockwise which relieves tension from the tensioner. Just try to slide it up and over. I want to try to make sure it goes into all the grooves. Slowly relieve pressure. Make sure my tool's still together, it is. Okay. Now we're just going to look at the serpentine belt and all the pulleys once again to make sure everything's sitting in nice. We can give the serpentine belt a little tug. It feels good. It's going around. Perfect.
Now a good habit to do would be to spark up your vehicle, let it run for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, turn it off, come back, check all your pulleys to make sure the belt wasn't off a tooth. If it is it'll probably work it's way off quite a bit at that point, but hopefully you didn't run it for too long where you would have destroyed your belt. If you run it for two minutes, well it's been off a tooth all this time, you're going to ruin your brand new belt. So we'll go 10, maybe 20 seconds. You just want to start it up, let it run for a little bit. We know that the belt does all it's looping around all the things, and then we'll turn it off, and then we'll check it.
All right, so now that we've double checked to make sure our belt's all lined up on all the pulleys, we're going to go ahead and reinstall our little plate here. It should be fairly simple. We got this right here, this is going to come in and right through the back side there, so what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to try to get that in first and then work this up and over, being very careful for our ABS wire that's hanging down here and our brake hose. So let's see what we can do. We can go one way or we can go the other way, whichever way we go... oh, first try. That's a surprise.
Anyway, I'm just going to make sure the center's pulled out, put it in, lock that one in. Now we can just go around and line up all the rest of them. Sometimes you'll get it and the center pushed in. Now it's in the locked mode. You can tell because all the prongs are pushed out. They all kind of made their way like that. Just probably me holding onto them. There isn't too much pressure involved there. So I'll just grab my little pocket screwdriver again, just going to pry it. You can do that or you can use your little fork tool if you have one. We basically just want the center to come up and out. I'm not going to jump ahead and do the next one yet because once I put this back in my other hand it's probably going to roll around and close up again. Just be a pain in the butt. They're like that. If you had to chase around the ice cubes, picks one up and drops it out of his glass every time he bends over. There we are.
So now it's time to put the wheel back on. So what we're going to do is we're going to make sure that we don't lift it with our back. We don't want to come from the front, try to bend over and lift it up, squish our back. We want to come from the side, put our leg up against it, just roll it up our leg. We can use our ab muscles to lift it up, that's why we got them. Put it on there. I'm just going to hold it so it can't roll off. I'm going to line up our hubcap hole with our little valve stem. Pretty easy. I'll get one lug nut on, get it started so we know the wheel can't fall off. Nice. Now I'll grab our other four and get those going. Then we'll just bottom them all out and then we'll torque them up when we get it closer to the ground.
We got the wheel on the ground. We don't have all the weight of the vehicle on it. We just want it enough so the wheel can't spin while I torque it. I'm going to go with my 21 millimeter socket, torquing this wheel to 83 foot pounds and I'm going to go in a star pattern. I'm going to start here, there, there, there, there. Make a nice pretty star, just like we did in our class. Then if you want to go around again you can go around again. I could have bottomed them out a little bit more, but at least I didn't over torque them right?
The reason for torquing in a star pattern like this is because if I just went around in a circle, I went here, here, here, let's say that the wheel was kind of co*ckeyed on to the hub and it wasn't sitting perfectly straight, and I went ahead and I torqued over here and it kind of kinked it in. Then I could come around here and I might get a click, even though it's 83, it might not be enough to really suck it in and get it up right against the hub. So if you go here, here, here, it has no choice but to start it and then pull it in there, then pull it in, and everything is nice and situated at that point. It's always good habit to just go around again. It doesn't take too much extra time, it doesn't cost you any extra money. So just go around. There we go.
So now we've completed our service. Great job everybody.
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