Zetec belt squeal kit

[athens7]

I am about to install George Alderman's (Mid Atlantic Caterham) kit to swap the serpentine belt tensioner back to the original (alternator) side of the engine. Any tips/tricks/warnings I should know about?

http://www.midatlanticcaterham.com/images/SquealKitFlyer.htm

http://www.midatlanticcaterham.com/images/CATERHAMPULLEYKIT.jpg

[Doug Liedblad]

I've not seen this particular kit before but it looks OK.

I used a kit from MSI that Woody had made up for the Zetec. The bad news is that I don't think he is making it anymore.

Doug

[athens7]

Here are the before and after photos:

When we removed the original serpentine belt, we found significant powder and some larger pieces of belt material in the grooves of the alternator pulley. It certainly appears the belt was deteriorating prematurely due to excessive play caused by the tensioner flexing under load. Clearly, the tensioner being a stressed mounting point on the pulling side of the belt assembly is not the correct layout. There is a slight concern that the new idler pulley is very slightly out of alignment with the other pulleys, but we'll have to watch and see. There is no belt shudder or movement, even at high rpms. I'm doing 200 road miles and an 8 run autocross Sunday, so we'll see how the new package performs in the real world.