Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2007 Toyota FJ Cruiser, and I'm going to be replacing the serpentine belt. It's going to be a very easy job, and I want to be the one that shows you how to do it. If you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.
Okay. I remove both these skid plates. Using my 12 millimeter. Can use a ratchet, can use an air gun, whatever you have access to obviously. Your guns a little bit quicker. There's four bolts, so I got three of them. I'm going to have one left here, so that means the skid plate's going to be ready to come down, so I'm going to get ready to hold that as soon as I get this on.
Here we are. Grab the skid plate, get that out of the way. We'll set it aside. So we'll do the forward skid plate now. There should be four bolts in this as well. One here, one there. One should be there, it's imaginary. One there also, imaginary. On the front of this, it has little hooks that go into the frame right here. It's one. Then the other one's right here. So what you would do is you would start with the forward ones. Take those out. Then you work your way to the East, okay? Once you remove these, the skid plate can come down this way towards you or towards the front. So you want to be careful for your face, but the hooks are going to make it so it can't completely fall straight down.
Okay, bring it down and then and slide it out towards the front of the vehicle. Shouldn't want to slide right out here. Just get this hook out of there. There it is. So here's the hooks I was talking about. You just go right up inside here. Okay, so here we go. We're going to use our 14 millimeter. We're going to go right to the tensioner right there and we're going to turn this counter-clockwise. That's going to relieve tension from the belt so we can slide it off. Just going to come over to this idler pulley. There we are. Let me get it off of the power steering pump too. That's going to give us plenty of slack. There we go. Get the ratchet out of here.
Let's move ahead to the next step. So let's just take a quick peek at the way that the belt goes real quick, we've got our crank here, right? It's the big crank. This is the rear engine crank. Comes around from the bottom of the crank, up over the lower idler pulley around your ac compressor, up to your alternator. Underneath the upper idler pulley. Comes right up over the top of your water pump pulley. That's this right here with your fan. Around to the power steering pump, around the bottom of the power steering pump. It's going to go up over this idler pulley, around under the bottom of the water pump at this point. Up over the top of this idler pulley, back around and to the crank. It sounds complicated. A picture might do you right, but I just wanted to at least verbalize it as well. So yeah, let's do it.
Just pull it all off of here. Once we get it off, we're going to match it up to our new belt just to make sure that we're dealing with the same beast. You want it to be approximately the same length, and of course have the same amount of ribs. If your new belt has more or less ribs, than it's definitely the wrong belt. Okay. Got the belt, just got to go up and over the fan. Here we are. There's our serpentine belt.
All right, so we've got our belts lined up. I'm just going thumb to thumb. They're both approximately the same length, which is great. I'll turn them around. We've got our rib section, got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, seven ribs. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven ribs on the new belt. Approximately the same width. Perfect. Let's install our new belt. We recycle that, dispose of it properly, whatever you want to say. Now to get it back up over the fan, I just go around a couple of the blades and then I spin the fan and it just draws it around for me. Just like that. Now the belt is up over the water pump. Cool. All right, now with that up there, what I'm going to do, look at it real quick. I'm going to bring it over the power steering. I'm going over this, the left side idler, come around, over to the other idler, bring it back up over the crank, around the crank, over the lower idler, up over here, straight up over the alternator. Under that idler, and then up and over. Okay, cool.
So now with it like this, we're just going to double check to make sure we're sitting in all of our little rungs. All the grooves there, or all the ribs are sitting in the groups. It looks good. Cool. I'm going to grab my 14 millimeter and we'll continue. Okay, so I've got my 14 millimeter and my ratchet up on top of the tensioner. I'm going to turn it counter-clockwise and that's going to relieve pressure. Same way we took off the belt, we're going to do the same thing here. So, now I'm just going to go as far as I can. The tensioner, slide it over my power steering, slowly let it back. I'm going to leave that on there for a second. I'm just going to feel around. It's definitely completely on the power steering. This is a smooth pulley, so you don't have to worry too much about that. Smooth pulley for the tensioner.
Come back around, goes up over this. That feels good around the water pump. Up around the alternator is good. Ac compressor is good. Crank's good. Cool. Okay. It's time to get this skid plate back up. We've got a little hook right there, that's going to go right in this hole right here okay?. What that's going do is to make it so if you had to, you could let go, right? And or you can hold towards the front and you don't have to worry about holding up the whole way to the skid plate. So I'm just going to take my bolts for the forward end of it. Get it started in the hole there. Not going to tighten it down until I get all four started. Alright, nice and easy here. Come around. I can see up there. This one. Perfect. Let's move ahead.
All right, so we've got our forward skid plate. We've got our little hooks on the skid plate. They go right up inside the slots okay? You've got two hooks, you've got two slots, so just bring it so it's straight up and down, line the hooks up with the slots. Now at this point, you can release the front, assuming you have both hooks there, and you can move along to the back where we can get this in and situated. All right. Should be wanting to go up in there. There we go, that one's started. There we go. Just going to blast him up in there. Theoretically, most of these skid plates have four, right? I have two up here too, so if you have those two up there, you're going to want to make sure you start those before you tighten these. There we go, tight. Tight. Very nice.
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