How To Maintain Tighten Noisy Squeeling AC Serpentine Belt VW Passat 18T

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In this video, we're going to show you how to maintain your A/C serpentine belt. On these vehicles there's a separate belt that runs the A/C compressor, and sometimes if you get a squealing when you turn your A/C on it can mean that the belt is loose, so what we show you here is how to tighten it, as well as tightening it. You should just check the belt and make sure it's in good working order and replace it if need be. So you do access this belt and tensioner from underneath the car, so you'll need to jack up and support the front of your car.

This belt is easiest to see from up underneath the car. You come right up under here, and you can see here's your A/C compressor and here's the belt. This is the tensioner right here and up above it is the crank pulley. Your tensioner is held on by two bolts. Let's see, there's one here, and then I can't really see it but it's not this. This is actually what you grab on to with a 17mm wrench to tighten the tensioner. Right in behind you'll feel another bolt just like this one and they're 6mm Allen bolts.

Here's my 6mm Allen wrench. You have a longer one that's probably the best thing, put that on there, then I take a wrench, hook it on there for some extra leverage, and loosen this bolt a couple turns. Now I'm going to put it up on my bolt up here. Not really a good way to film this. I'm just going to speed it up here. Like I said, there's no good way to film it. You just get your Allen wrench on there, use the other wrench for some leverage, and loosen up the bolt up top just a couple turns to loosen up the tensioner. Now I'm going to take a 17mm socket and a flex bar, and I'm going to put that up on the tensioner where there's a bolt-shaped protrusion.

Then you can see I push on this and that tightens up my belt. I'm going to actually just go up here, get my Allen wrench into my mounting bolt. What I'm doing here is using the Allen wrench to get that screw just a little bit tight, then a grab ahold of that bar and put some force on it to tighten the belt up, then tighten the Allen wrench bolt as much as I can to hold it in place.

With my Allen wrench right there, I'm just going to grab it with a pair of pliers and use the pliers and tighten it up. Then just tighten up this one here. Same thing, just use the pliers for extra leverage and tighten it up.

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