SERPENTINE BELT

Occasionally, you should replace the serpentine belt. You can pay the dealer of Jiffy Lube to do it, or you can do it yourself for one third the price. I don't know about you, but saving $50 dollars on a 5 minute project seems like good sense to me. After all, it is easy and Jiffy lube won't be on the trail or on the side of the highway if your belt fails. So you need to learn to do it yourself. Below are the picture on how to do it.

This is what a belt with nearly 87,000 mile on it looks like. The book suggests replacement much sooner than this.

This is the tension arm. Notice the square hole between the two rectangular ones on the arm? The hole is for a half inch wrench.

Put the wrench in the hole and push it towards the driver's side.

Pull off the old belt. Put on the new belt. The pulleys with the grooves get the grooved part of the belt. The smooth pulleys get the smooth part of the belts. To make things easy, the last pulley to install the belt on should be the one above the tension pulley. Ta da. That should have taken less than five minutes and saved you $50.00. Cha-ching! Toss the old belt in the trunk as a trail spare.