I would have paid somebody too—I wanted to, but I couldn’t find anybody I felt good about. The only place I’d trust that’s not 10 hours away from me is booked up for a year, though. The good places always are. I trust myself more than the mom and pop performance shops that are near me. One relatively local place that came highly recommended scoffed at doing a gear swap and dyno tuning my 2018 GT in late 2020, saying it was too new for him, so I didn’t even bother asking about my 21. I may not be an expert, but I can read a damn service manual. Lol. I work on equipment that costs 3 times what this car costs, so I got over the pucker factor a long time ago.
Did you check their website? I know that they typically post instructions there, when they have them. The critical piece I'd focus on is the position of the tensioner with everything in place. You want it clocked pretty much like it came with the factory belt. A little variance either way won't make much difference. Tighter is probably better than looser, but that looks like pretty good belt wrap. What I can't see is the idler for the balancer belt. You want that idler on the lower hole of the claw, but it seems you know that. There are two holes for that lower idler and the higher bolt hole would be for an oversized balancer (10-20%). I'm sort of amazed the factory belt works as well as it seems to. Great write up.
Yeah, there’s nothing but a link to that video where I took the screenshot on their website.
It’s really hard to get a good picture since it’s so close to the radiator, but it’s as close to parallel with the ground as it can get. When you put a digital protractor on a breaker bar inserted into the tensioner 3/8 drive hole, it’s basically 90 degrees. You can’t really directly measure it since the arm on the tensioner tapers down. It’s definitely closer to the belt coming up from the balancer than in the VMP video, but they were using a 20% overdrive balancer and the upper claw hole in the video. I’m using the bottom hole and stock balancer. I don’t think there’s any danger of belt rubbing. I’ve never seen a serpentine belt stretch appreciably.
Yeah, I was thinking of trying a half inch shorter belt to get a little more clearance by the tensioner, but I’m not 100% sure the belt I think is 1/2” shorter really is. The specs are all over the place and sometimes contradictory unless you’re buying the same brand and line. I think I’m going to just run it for a bit and make sure I don’t have any issues after it runs for a while and everything settles in.
Looks Fantastic Chad.Yeah, I’m too lazy to rip everything apart again. I think I’ll just wait for VMP to get the tune ready. It’s pouring rain for the next couple days, so it’s not like I’m going to drive the car, anyway.
Be sure to hook a battery charger to the battery. Low voltage can kill computers when doing this stuff.
That’s probably what happened with the lithium batt. I had my Ctek 4.3 amp plugged in, and it still dropped about 1% every couple minutes. Once a lithium hits about 80%, it’s done. There’s quite a bit of draw when you’re reading stock files. It even turns the electric intercooler pump on the entire time. I don’t think the Ctek could keep up, and lithium batts have a lot less reserve than lead acid, even though they advertise otherwise.
