The van has done it again

[Graham.]

It's always a woman that turns up in the TV ads, and with your reputation Adam, I'm sure she could be releaved of her panty-hose.

[Jimk]

;-)

[ARW]

Need I say any more?

AA took 57 minutes to turn up, my longest ever wait.

A very simple breakdown but they just did not have the part.

Alternator belt.

Would most cars or vans give a warning light if it snapped?

[tabbypurr]

Yeah, no charging lights the charge light.

Carry rope, that'll turn it at low speed enough to get you somewhere. Even without any belt, as long as the oil pump isn't run by it cars/vans can be driven with no fan - they can overheat when sitting around idling. And of course minimise electricity use, the battery charge will run out. Modern cars can be hungry on electricity.

NT

[Chris Hogg]

Ladies' tights are also a possibility.

[RJH]

Yes, surprised there's no warning light. Probably failed ;-)

Belt driven oil pump is not common IME - but water pump is. Something relatively elastic (use your stockings) can just about manage for a very low load, if you can get to it . . .

[Tim+]

A hundred years ago possibly. I can?t imagine getting rope or tights around the convoluted paths taken by modern belts. The pulleys have also changed from a simple ?V? shape profile to being flat with multiple small ?vvvvvvv? grooves. Can?t see rope or tights staying put on these.

Additionally, as just about everything has power steering these days, I would have thought load now carried by the belt is way about what a pair of tights could cope with.

Tim

[Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)]

I think those might be a bit big for his application. It might be worth, however looking for some belts that will do the job but might actually be meant for other uses entirely, sometimes one can find them in packs of assorted belts, often used in washing machines etc. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)]

Not knowing about the car, some have more than one belt, the hydraulics on one and another for the e fan and alternator, though usually these days the fan is actually on an electric motor, one supposes to keep it cool in all those gridlocked jams around these days. You bring back memories of when my father was alive and my tactile imaging was welcome at getting things into awkward places and engaging spanners on nuts which are out of sight. I actually hate greasy things, that is the only down side!

Can you reach down there and pull the belt onto the pulley while I rotate the thing from this end.. argh. Brian

[TimW]

Sorry to hear that. My experience of switching from AA to RAC to try to get a good price year after year tells me the AA are far, far better than the RAC these days. The RAC's speciality is turning up, declaring that you aren't covered for some technical reason but kindly offering to sort you out if you produce a credit card there and then and pay a second time for what you thought you had already paid for.

A broken belt for instance, would sound like a breakdown but they might declare that it was a maintenance failure on your part. "Did you check it for wear before you left this morning, sir? I will have to call base.... I am so sorry it seems you aren't covered"

TW

[Jethro_uk]

If you had one, they could have fitted it (see also: clutch cable).

Yes.

[Jethro_uk]

It used to be that the light was part of the circuit that energised the windings. If it didn't come on with the ignition, and go out when the engine started, the alternator wasn't working - whether because the rectifier or bulb had failed. It was quite an elegant setup.

I imagine it's been lost to massively over-complicated electronic fripperies nowdays.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

The so called ignition warning light would normally come on. One of the ones that comes on at switch on. and only goes out when you start the engine.

[NY]

I've always wondered how rope or tights can be tensioned sufficiently tightly so they grip the pulleys. Unless there is a spring-loaded tensioning pulley. Also, I'd have thought that the knot where you join the rope/tights to itself would tend to make the "belt" jump out of the pulley.

My car has alternator and power steering pump on the "fan belt". The fan is electric - do any modern vehicles still have a mechanical fan? I imagine mechanical fans were superseded when engines were changed from longitudinal to transverse, because there is no easy way of getting mechanical drive from the side of the car (near one of the wheel arches) to the radiator in the front grille.

When my fan belt broke, I was on the motorway late at night. The first indication was a loud thump, followed by a flapping for a few seconds and then silence (as the belt flapped before falling off). Then I noticed that the steering felt very heavy. Then I looked away from the road at the dashboard and saw what I expected: the red ignition light.

Luckily I was close to the junction where I was planning to come off anyway, so I managed to limp to a petrol station off the dual carriageway where I could wait for the RAC van. Like ARW's experience, the RAC didn't have a belt or the ability to fit it "in the field", so all they could do was tow me home so I could take the car to the garage the following day. Sadly the little garage that I used in the village, which had done perfectly good work in the past, dropped a bollock with the fan belt. They didn't notice that one of the pulley flanges was bent (this may even have caused the belt to fray and break) so a thousand or so miles later the replacement belt broke. The second time I took the car to the main dealer and they did a proper job, replacing pulley as well as belt.

[NY]

Ah, I hadn't realised that some cars still had belt-driven water pump. I remember when I had the cambelt replaced at the routine 100,000 miles, the garage asked me whether I wanted the water pump replacing at the same time: it seemed to be working fine but there was no way to know whether it would fail in the near future, and because it was driven from the cambelt, replacement of the pump involved the same labour as replacement of the cambelt - so it was better to spend £20 unnecessarily on the water pump than have to fork out for several hundred pounds of labour all over again to remove the engine to replace the pump by accessing the cambelt.

I'd assumed that cambelt-driven water pump was fairly common. This was on a Peugeot 308 HDi. Other cars may differ.

[NY]

Would the RAC or AA really be able to fit a modern fan belt, with its tortuous path of pulleys and tensioners, at the roadside, assuming they had the correct one?

My experience of RAC is that they are a towing-home service: each time I've called them out, it's been something that was far too complicated for them to fix at the roadside. Fanbelt on two occasions, and hydraulic clutch actuator (not cable) on the other occasion. Maybe I keep my cars sufficiently well maintained that it's not likely to be a trivial failure (which they *can* fix) which requires me to call them out. I suppose one RAC call (clutch) in 180,000 miles on my present car, and two related ones (fan belts) in 150,000 miles on my previous car, isn't a bad record!

Actually there was one other RAC callout with the previous Pug, and that was for help with changing a wheel... I could change a wheel in my sleep, but on that car the spare was held in a wire cage below the boot floor (on the outside). The retaining bolt on the Pug 306 didn't have a sensible hex head the same size as the wheel nuts (so you use the same wheelbrace to unscrew the bolt as if it was a wheelnut). No, the pillocks at Peugeot had designed the bolt to have a semi-cylindrical notch in the top of a smooth circular head, into which you inserted the flattened end of the wheelbrace like a very crude screwdriver. And the threads of the bolt had seized because of water sprayed onto it, so the "screwdriver" couldn't get enough purchase to shift the bolt. We tried a Mole wrench initially, but that couldn't grip the smooth sides of the bolt head. It took the RAC man about half an hour with WD40 and blowtorch (shielded from the tyre!) to get it to move. He offered to change the wheel while I was there, so I made a bet with him - a tenner if I could do it quicker than he could have done (assuming the he was not using a pneumatic wheelnut wrench). I won the bet!!! After that, I greased the bolt and the nut on the cage every month or so, working it loose and then tightening it to prevent the two rusting together,

[charles]

or when the bulb blows - happened to me many years ago.

[Jethro_uk]

Well they can't fit one you haven't got :)

"Back in the day" the patrolman was actually quite a competent mechanic. However I am guessing that the increased complexity of modern cars, coupled with the decreased willingness to pay for skill means that the SOP for any breakdown is simply lift and shift. <snip spare wheel woes>

Do many cars have spare wheels these days ?

[tabbypurr]

just pull it as tight as you can while tying. The resulting tension is poor but IME enough to turn the fan some.

that can happen. Generally the knot is pushed out of the way, but on occasion not. Keep the revs down.

going to make it much harder to get an ad-hoc belt to work. And PAS-only steering systems can be a problem to drive without the PAS sometimes.

that's a very basic failure on their part surely

NT

[Jethro_uk]

If it doesn't come on with the ignition, you won't get charge from the alternator. It used to be there were 2 warning lights you wanted to see with the ignition on, and not see with the engine running. Alternator and oil pressure.