More Adventures with Cars

I figured things couldn’t get any worse…

Ever since I had the timing belt on the Hyundai replaced (it’s a maintenance item with timing belts — they should be done every 60K-75K miles), the car’s had a belt squeal. We never got around to getting it back to the shop to get them to properly tighten it up. So, it being a nice day today, I figured I’d get out there and look at it.

Turns out that Hyundai doesn’t rely on a single serpentine belt to run everything on the engine, which, to my mind, is a good thing. In fact, there are three drive belts on the car. One is the primary one, which runs the alternator and probably the water pump. The A/C and power brakes are on separate belts. The one for the brakes is not adjustable, as near as I cold tell, nor is the one for the A/C. Fortunately, both were properly tight.

That left the primary drive belt. Mmmm. Very loose. Okay, where’s the tensioner? Most cars, you loosen one of the alternator bolts, tilt the alternator, and wrench it down. Not so one the Hyundai. Instead, there’s a tension adjustment bolt. Nice, I’d say. Find the right wrench and adjust! Cool.

That’s when the whole adjustment-ma-bob fell off in my hand. WTF? Ah, there’s no bolt holding the adjustment-ma-bob to the alternator! That’s odd. It looks as if the dealer either didn’t torque the thing down enough when they swapped out the timing belt, or forgot to re-insert it, and so, it’s gone. Of course, I didn’t have a bolt the right size, so I’ve stuck a band-aid on it, of sorts, to get through a couple of days. Tomorrow, (after I drop Donna at work, the cat at the vet and visit the Ford shop) I’ll have to trundle by the dealer to see if I can coerce them into giving me the part — and maybe even fixing it for me — at no charge, since I’m guessing they screwed up (no pun intended) in the first place.

Oh, yeah. That’s right. I told you yesterday about the van taking a crap on me. We took it down and dropped it off to the shop this afternoon to see about getting the disco light show on the dash board taken care of. That was an adventure, especially towards the end of the run. The thing really, really didn’t want to run while I was stuck at that last intersection. I was afraid to let it stall, though, for fear it wouldn’t restart again. I’ll pass through there with the vehicle’s repair history tomorrow morning and see what they think of that situation.

They’ve got a real nice looking lightly used KIA on the lot there …