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[frobozz]

Oh, I thought I should also add some tool notes. I didn't use any ratchet straps, or long-handled special tools, and there's certainly not enough room on a dual-alt setup to have a beefy friend grab the main belt and pull on it, so I just used 1/2" ratchet handles.

For the secondary belt, working from above, I stuck a 1/2" ratchet handle directly into the square hole in the tensioner. With the handle pointing towards the passenger side of the truck, and the wrench in "tighten" mode, I simply yanked up on the handle. I could easily hit the end of travel of the tensioner, at which point I slipped the belt off of the second alternator pulley. As I slowly released the handle, it ended up resting on one of the shroud blades before all the tension was released, so I just left it there while I continued to work; it wasn't in the way of anything. At the very end when I put the second belt back on (by slipping the last loop around the second alternator pulley) I was pulling up on that wrench again, and when I released it, it of course stopped far short of that shroud blade, and then I just popped it out of the square hole.

For the main belt, I took another 1/2" ratchet handle, also in tighten mode, and put a short extension on it. I crawled under the truck and put the extension into the square hole on the main tensioner, and lined the handle up pointing towards the driver's side of the truck, which means it was just under the fan hub. That left me a ton of room up behind the shroud to pull down on the handle as it arced towards the passenger side. Once the belt was loosened, I slid it off of one of those pulleys under there, I believe it was the A/C compressor. Unthreading it and rethreading it is a nightmare exercise left for the reader, but in this case I did remove the ratchet handle from the truck while I did that. When reinstalling, I left the unthreaded loop up at the main alternator, and used the wrench in the same position as before to release the tension, while my lovely assistant fed the belt over the alternator pulley. It's also important at that point to scoot the belt so it's square on the two idlers just below the alternator, because they tend to be crooked from where the belt was sitting before being put on the pulley. Then release the tensioner slowly until it takes up the slack on the belt, remove the ratchet and extension, and that part is all done.

In both cases, there is enough depth to the 1/2" hole to fully seat the wrench or extension. Just push harder.

I can think of a lot of choice words for the engineers who designed the belt routing, and the people who packaged it all in there with the multi-piece hand-shredding shroud, but the tensioners at least were well thought out and worked exactly as designed, with simple tools. That part of the whole experience was very easy.

Duncan