Dammit!!

During our foreign trip the fan belt started slipping for some unknown reason. As everyone knows, this causes an embarrassing squealing noise. Being a lazy sod and being on holiday, I decided to leave it alone until I got home. I thought I could put up with the funny looks I was getting from the French neighbours.

Well, today was the day that I got round to tackling it.

On this car the belt is tensioned by adjusting the screw that you can see in the photo (13mm) but first you have to loosen the locking bolt (19mm). This was incredibly tight but I did manage to loosen it though.


Tensioning Bolt


Then disaster struck!

I over-tightened the tensioning mechanism and sheared the sodding tensioning bolt off! For some reason I screwed it beyond its limit……(what an idiot). It seemed that no matter how far I turned the tensioner bolt it would not tighten the belt. Don’t know why this is unless the belt has stretched a lot but I’ve never seen that happen before?

Well, there is nothing I can do about removing a sheared stud so I gave the AA a call. This would be about the third time I have ever called them in over 20 years of motoring! They were very responsive and called round in less than an hour. The poor old AA man took a look at it and decided he couldn’t fix it (not surprised really). However, since I am relatively paranoid about problems with cars I have the top level of AA cover. This means that I will at least get it towed into a garage when I find one that can do the job. Apparently I will get a hire car for 48 hours as well. So at least I am on the road at the moment!