3 Litre GU......belt tensioner issue.

G'day one and all. We've just got back from a great (but too short) weekend at Boundry Bend on the Murray. (about 50klm upstream from Robinvale).

We went over there to meet up with our good friends from Yass (g'day Pud, Barb, Sophie and Sarah). Pud's got a 2000 GU auto and it has had a sort of funny rattle in the donk, virtually since the time they bought it brand new. The rattle had been getting worse lately, so Sunday morning we decided to have a close look....thinking it was a bearing in the idler pulley or somewhere in that area.

Off came the large plastic shroud. (Fair dinkum, a bloke could have a pyss-up with half a dozen mates in the space between the radiator and the fan on those cars). We found what looks like a mini shock absorber, about 4" or 5" long. On close inspection from underneath, it was soon apparent that the thing had seized up and the bottom mounting hole had elongated to the point where the bolt head had worked it's way so close to the body of the shaft/shocky, that we couldn't get a 13mm socket or ring spanner on to it. The top bolt was accessible (12mm bolt), so we undid that one and the 2 halves of the "shocky" sprang apart.

It was not a shocky at all, but rather an aluminium contraption with a very powerful compression coil spring inside it. There was a piston on the upper portion that was supposed to move easily into the lower section as a guide; on the inside of the spring, but the whole thing was rusty and would not move freely. A bit of WD40 fixed that, but then it took us several hours to work out a way of compressing the thing back together to get it in it's proper place. We found a steel bush to replace the worn aluminium one in the bottom end and encased that in a short piece of garden hose instead of the original rubber outer bush that had totally worn away. We used my 6 tonne hydraulic jack to push on the bottom mounting, while holding the whole thing in place under the bottom of the Treg coupling on the towbar. By doing this we were able to eventually compress the thing far enough. Pud then used a fair quantity of tie wire to hold the thing together long enough to get it from the back of my truck the it's home under his bonnet and get the 2 bloody bolts back in place. The tie wire was then cut off/pulled out with pliers and a new belt which he had with him was fitted. It didn't look like the old belt had much useable life left in it either.

So there you have it, I suggest you 3 litre owners check that your belt tensioner is functioning properly and grease it if possible. Note that there is a cast-on bolt head on the bracket that holds the idler pulley and you are meant to whack a socket spanner on that to give you the leverage you need to take the tension off the belt and it should make a belt replacement an easy task. We were unable to get ANY movement out of the tensioner pulley by using the said spanner before we pulled the thing apart. Once the job was done and we kicked her over, the motor ran sweeter than it ever had.....no funny noises.

Pud is gunna have to buy and fit a new tensioner, as the job we did was really only a "get home safely" temporary set-up.

Cheers

Roachie