Serpentine belt install

[TominMO]

I have a 2009 Kia Rondo, basically a small soccer-mom SUV. Serpentine belt was squeaking after 126K miles, so I decided to replace it today. Never done one before. Started about 9:30am, and a nice warm day. Previously I had watched some YT vids on this job.

Jacked up the car, pulled the wheel. Removed the three easily-accessed 10mm bolts holding on the splash shield in the pass. side fender well. Got a 17mm wrench on the tensioner and was able to pull it far enough over to get the old belt off the crank pulley. From then it took a couple of minutes persuading it off the rest of the pulleys and out of the engine bay, but not too bad. I wiggled the idler and tensioner pulleys to see if any needed replacing, but they seemed fine. Also wiggled the water pump pulley to check for play. Nada.

I had a fair idea of how the belt routed around the pulleys, but not perfect. Luckily my neighbor Joe, who drives a big rig and is probably a better shadetree guy than me, was outside so I called him over. He has done serp belts before, more luck. He straightened me out on the routing. I had a diagram to go by, printed off Rock Auto, but still.

The really hard part was getting the new belt on. We figured the old belt had stretched just enough that it was easier to get off than this one was going on. All I had was a rather short 17mm wrench. After about 30 minutes of helping me, he had to leave to get on the road (he's away from Mon - Fri). Total elapsed time so far, about one hour, so 10:30 now.

Now for the new belt. All alone and with a too-short wrench. I'll skip all the various things I tried and get to the endgame. What I ended up doing was using a scissors jack, and a block of wood for an extension, to push the wrench over far enough to move the tensioner pulley and hold it in place, so I could slip the belt on, which took both hands.

Finally got this done at 2:30pm. Tired, sore, but victorious! New belt is squeal-free. As it turned out, a longer wrench would not have let me push the tensioner far enough; it would have been stopped by other car parts. But if it ratcheted, maybe it would have worked. I was limited by the 12-point head, which only gave me one halfway decent (but not good enough) angle to work with.

The best way to do this alone is have the car on a lift and use a wrench like this one:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...f76b4f792&th=1

I ended up needing to use a 17mm offset box wrench, because the belt not yet being all the way on the tensioner was an issue. I have this wrench, but it has too severe an angle to get into the small space in front of the tensioner pulley. I ended up using an 11/16" offset wrench, which has less offset. 11/16" is 17.46mm, so it was close enough without rounding off the bolt head, thank God.

Gonna rain tomorrow and I have places to be, so lucky I got it done today!

Conversion from SAE to metric
1/16" is 1.5875mm. Call it 1.59mm. Multiply 1.59mm X the number of 16th's to get its metric equivalent. For example 9/16" = 9 x 1.59mm = 14.31mm. And 3/4" = 19.08mm.