First encounter with “Strech to Fit” belt

[Nik Conant]

Greetings!
This is actually my first post, but been stalking for a while and been watching Eric’s videos for a couple of years. This weekend I had my first encounter with a “Stretch to Fit” belt, I’ve also read it called in elastic belt. I thought I’d share with yall my experience and my final solution.

My girlfriend has a 2011 Ford Festa. I haven’t had to work on the car for the last 3 months we’ve been dating. So I didn’t really have an opinion on the car. Acrually thought it was pretty nice because it wasn’t a clunker like some of the previous girls I’ve dated. Anyway, last week I was working on my car when she came over an asked if I’d look at her car and see why it may be making an odd noise from the passenger side of the engine bay. I looked under the hood and her belt was toasted. I offered to change it. I didn’t know it was a “Stretch to Fit” belt until I couldn’t find the tensioner. I did some googling, found a Motorcraft belt with FoMoCo install tool on amazon, so I had her order it. How hard can this be.

The belt kit arrives, and last Friday I set out to install it. I get the belt “ramp” (shore horn type thing that pulls the belt on while you crank the main pulley) and the belt retainer (a wire thing that you mount to the timing cover that helps pull the belt onto the water pump pulley) I fallow the instructions in the kit and after some fighting and cursing the belt goes on (mangling the FoMoCo tool in the process) WooHoo its done…. Not quite :dry: The retainer had pulled the belt under the water pump pulley and its now jammed up. Seeing as there is no tensioner I can’t take the belt off and try again. I fussed with it a bit then I got pissed and cut it off. Off to the parts house to see if I can get the belt kit locally because I don’t want to wait for amazon again. AutoZone doesn’t stock it its 3 days out. O’Reilly’s Doesn’t stock it, they say its a day out. NAPA doesn’t stock it ether, its 5 days out. Crap! I ordered it from O’Reilly’s. and picked up an installer tool from Autozone because no one stocks the kits, only the belts alone. Saturday I had scheduled to help my friend drop a SD33 into is IH Scout, so she had to wait til Sunday.

Sunday rolls around and we’re off to O’Reilly’s. We get there and they tell me my order has been canceled because their warehouse doesn’t have any belts in stock. Double Crap. We drive off and try to figure out a solution to getting another belt that day, and I pass a CarQuest and they’re open! I never remember to call CarQuest because they’re never open when I’m in a pinch. I went into CarQuest and they actually had the belt in stock!!! and the clerk marked it down for me when I told him how much crap this job has given me. Woot! thanks CarQuest.

I went home to install it and there is no way to use the installer tool on the Festa. The tool required there be a hole near the outer edge of the pulley, and the Festa only has a dimple about a 3/16″ deep. None of the pegs from the install tool kit would mount to that pulley. I ended up breaking the installer tool trying to use it in that dimple. So I ran back to CarQuest and asked if they had a tool. They did, made by Dayco, and 3 times the price of the one at AZ. I get it home and sure enough it also needs a hole near the edge of the pulley to mount up. I decided not to even mess with that tool because I’d probably trash it if i did.

I then started scratching my head and thinking about the problem. There had to be a solution that I could come up with to get this belt on. This is what I came up with!

its a 18mm socket to grab the crank bolt and a random Taiwan socket I found rolling around my tool box to act as a “shoe horn” to walk the belt around.

I used the retainer from the original ford kit, but rebend it so it wouldn’t pull the belt so close to the block. With my home made tool and the retainer bent to the proper shape the belt went on pretty easy.

It took me the better part of Sunday to come up with this solution. So I wanted to share with the rest of the world. maybe save someone else some money on weak tools from the parts store and their Sunday afternoon.

Topic

[Justin]

I learned about these when I worked at Mazda. I found using a flat head screw driver worked well until I bought the correct tool lol. Bottom line is they suck.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[James P Grosso]

I hate them too. First time was on my daughters 2008 Subaru

[Author]

Replies