do you have a coolant leak thats spraying coolant on the belt?

 

A pulley puller my powersteering pulley was off just a tad pulled it out a little no more squeel, I dont think you can use it for the a/c pulley, but you can check if a pulley is out of line by taking a long skinny screwdriver and pushing the belt side to side while the truck is running(Be Careful if you do this and do it from the oppsite side of the fan)

 

+1 on this. if you have a slight leak around the water pump seal/shaft, and its leaking coolant down onto the belt, or spraying it, then coolant will soak into the belt, making it slick, which will squeal. it will also take awhile to do this, oh, say about a few months.

other fluids can contaminate the belt including degreasers, soaps, ps oil, engine oil, etc. oils will usually appear greasy as **** on the belt and are easily visible.

check for coolant loss a couple of ways.
fill rad and overflow tank to exactly the full mark. monitor the overflow tank for loss.
after running the engine up to temp, shut it off an let it cool down for 20-30 minutes, then look and feel at the bottom of the water pump pulley for a green drip.

 

If you try an change your belt with the engine running, you might be a redneck! haha!

 

Ok so now this is really starting to drive me crazy, the problem has come back after 3-4 days with new parts on. The belt driveline is "Chirping", at least that is how it started this past Saturday. Don't know if the temperature outside has anything to do with it, but it was -20 degrees C outside that morning when I noticed a slight chirp now and then. Then later on Saturday I had to do a little road trip, about 400km, kind of hard driving, speeds up to 150km/h max. Everything was good and it seemed that the more I pushed the engine harder, the chirping would go away, and it did completely at about 1/4 into my trip. Get home fine, that was Saturday.

Sunday morning I go to start up the truck to warm her up, then about 5 minutes after, the belt starts make a noise, a noise like the belt snapped and was whiping around in the engine compartment. I shut her down, take a look and I see the the belt has jumped a groove on the A/C compressor and is now misaligned on that pulley going towards the compressor. I have no tools with me so all I could do was climb in and pull the belt with my hands back into proper place to realign it. I start her up again and almost immediately the belt goes back off by one groove and is misaligned again.

Strange, I was able to drive it perfectly fine for these past few days with a new tensioner, idler pulley and belt, and all of a sudden this happens.

So today I'm going to order the short belt again, the one for engines without A/C to bypass the A/C compressor and see if the belt skips again. I'm going to assume that the Compressor may be slightly tilted out of alignment somehow that would cause the belt to track to one side of the pulley, perhaps at somepoint a previous owner changed the Compressor and it wasn't mounted corrrectly? But that still doesn't explain my belt squeel or chirping, since before I changed the previously mentioned parts, I was already using the shorter belt to bypass the A/C and was still getting chirping.

This is so mind boggling for me....

 

Quickaddict was having a problem similar to this just yesterday I think he ended up putting his belt tensioner on wrong
here is link

 

Thanks for that link, i've read through it and for a moment thought we had exactly the same problem, but in the end its not the same problem; I never removed the tensioner bracket.

Today I got a short belt to bypass the A/C, and the strangest thing, its the correct part number, but the belt won't go on! It is just way to damm short. I got the belt from NAPA, and its a 7K880 or 880K7 (Same s@#$).

Is this the right belt?

I searched the internet and found different results, some same:
880K7 and 885K7 for 5.2L w/o A/C
973K7 and 975K7 for 5.2L with A/C


I'm really confused.

 

Well I took a look at the previous belt I was using as a short belt mod, it was a 7K895. The one I recently purchased was a 7K880 which is why it was too short, but that was the listing that NAPA had. The NAPA guy had to cross reference the Part # I had for the old Dayco belt and discovered that it is listed to fit Jeep Cherokee 5.2L. Arn't they the same engines?

Anyway. When I was changing the belt again, I noticed that the power steering pulley has a little play in it. Is it ok that I can pull the whole power steering pulley and shaft out about 1/8"? It moves by hand this much if I pry on it. I was curious if this amount of play is bad and possibly some power steering fluid might get past the seal. I don't see any but the Pump does have a Mopar Remanufactured label on it, so at some point someone did replace the p/s pump.

So now i'm running on a short belt mod, bypassed the A/C because the previous belt (7K973) kept on skipping a groove on the A/C compressor so I think the A/C compressor is out of line.