Just checked my drive belt and found that half of it is missing. This is the second belt and there's only 35K on the car.

About a year ago it ate the whole belt with only 11K miles on the car. At that time the dealer found nothing wrong with the car and wrote it off as a bad belt. Obviously that's not the case. Chances of me having two bad belts have to be close to zero. The maintenance interval is 30K and I've gotten 11K and now 24K out of them.

So my question is, is there anything obvious that I should be looking for so I can tell the dealer what to do? I can't be driving around knowing that somewhere between 11K and 24K my belt is going to let go and I'm not confident that they'll find anything this time either without some help.

Thanks

 

I replaced the belt as a precaution at 40K, and my mechanic said that that wasn't even necessary (nothing appeared wrong with the old one). In your case, there is definitely something wrong with the pulley system (most likely it is improperly tensioned, misalignment is possible but less likely), but could be other things. There is an article on belts that is worth reading.

 

^^^+1 on what he said.

 

My belt has ripped 2 times already. First at 29,000, second time was last week at 69,000 miles. The dealer said they checked everything and found no problems, but i've been telling them there is a clicking noise when i shut off my air conditioner. Of course the first time i reported the noise they couldn't replicate the sound. So today i went back and they finally heard the noise i've been complaining about. They think it might be some kind of bearing inside the ac unit. Tomorrow i will take my car in so they can find out what that noise is.

I'm not sure if this noise is related to the reason why my belt keeps ripping apart... but i would suggest you check and see if your car makes a similar noise when you shut off your AC. Best of luck.

-ernie

 

Got the car back from the dealer. They checked everything out and found that the tensioner pulley was "wobbling" which caused the belt to saw back and forth on the other pulleys. I imagine the sawing was only possible because there was only half a belt there. With a new belt it probably just created lateral stress. But whatever the case, they replaced the pulley and the belt under warranty and I'm back in business.