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[frobozz]

OK, I cut the shroud. I too was hesitant to hack up my truck... until I actually looked at it! It's a pre-perforated cut line, has holes for screws to go through in the top part, and into in the bottom part. Piece of cake, used a sharp utility knife to slice the perforations. I had to remove the air cleaner to get at the left side, but it was finally due for that anyway... with 63K miles since the last change, the filter minder had moved to about the midway point.

I figured out why nobody else has mentioned this in previous threads: the main belt does indeed come out without needing to go around the fan! It's only the secondary alternator belt that has this issue. So if you don't have the dual alts, you don't need to cut the shroud, or get the belt past the wires, or any of that.

That is absolutely the world's longest serpentine belt, routed in the most ridiculously contorted fashion. The diagram on my truck is correct, which helped a lot. Is it because I have dual alts, or because I have such an early truck, that my main tensioner had no lever to keep it in the released position? I made do though, with a helper to put the last loop back on at the end.

And I am *very* happy to report that all my squeaking is gone! The updated belts indeed completely fixed that. It had been squeaking on shutdown forever, but was more recently audibly squeaking just while driving down the road. All gone. I was afraid that in addition to the belts maybe I had an idler going, but nope. I wish I'd done that sooner. Other than the whole bloody-hands-from-threading-them-past-all-the-sharp-parts thing.

Duncan