How to Replace AC Compressor Belt 1998-2004 Dodge Intrepid

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Hi, I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing or maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20-plus years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly: that's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.

In this video, we're going to show you how to remove and replace the A/C compressor belt on this 2004 Dodge Intrepid with the 2.7-liter V6. You will need to remove both belts to do this, so the tools you'll need are 13mm and 15mm wrenches, a 13mm socket with a ratchet and a long extension, and you may actually just use a couple of extensions connected together and then also 1/2 inch drive ratchet.

To find your belt routing diagram and on this vehicle, it's in front of the radiator kind of towards the driver's side, and just get a feeling of what this shows you in relation to how the belts are routed. It will help you a lot when you're putting the belts back on and when you're taking them off.

To remove this front belt here, there's basically two things. Right, let's see if I can get a good shot of it. Right here is a 15mm bolt on that pulley or nut, you need to loosen that and then way down in there, let's see here, right here is a 13mm bolt that tensions or loosens the slack on the belt. Down here, you can see I've got a 15mm wrench on that pulley nut, and what you can do is if you can't get enough leverage to move that wrench, okay, I take another wrench and I hook it on and that gives me, it's hard to see here, it gives me more leverage, and you just carefully pull and eventually loosen that nut. Eventually, you'll get it so you can just use the 15mm wrench. I'm continuing to loosen up this 15mm. I'm going to loosen it up good, two or three turns here. We'll just fast forward a little bit as I loosen up that nut some more.

Now I've got the correct tool which is a ratchet, 13mm socket, and a really long extension. You can put two or three extensions together, but this just lets me go down, get right on that bolt down there, and loosen it up. As you loosen, you can pull on the belt a little bit, and you'll feel the belt coming loose. Now, with the belt nice and loose, you just pull it right off of your power steering belt. Then you need to reach way down and pull it off your crank, and you can pull it right up and out.

Now, after you've removed that outer belt, to remove this inner belt here there's a tensioner right there, and let's see if I can get a shot of this. Then there are two 13mm bolts. Right there where those arrows are pointing, and you want to use a 13mm wrench and loosen those up. You're going to have to take my word for it that what I'm doing right here is loosening those 13mm bolts. I do use an extra wrench just like on the pulley nut. Use an extra wrench, hook it onto the end to give myself a little more leverage, and then, as you start loosening those bolts, you'll actually start seeing the belt. It actually tensions because that tensioner defaults to putting more tension on the belt.

Now you're going to want to take a 1/2 inch ratchet, and there's a hole in the tensioner. Let's see if I can get it in there. Let's see if I can give you a better view of that. You can see my ratchet is in the tensioner right there, and then when I push down the belt loosens up. Now I'm pushing down on my 1/2 inch ratchet. Slip the belt off the tensioner and slowly let your tensioner back up. Remove your ratchet, and now you can remove your A/C belt like that.

Here's the diagram again. That A/C belt is the one on the left side, it just goes down around the crank, around your A/C compressor, and then up and over the tensioner while you're applying pressure on the tensioner with your ratchet handle.

To get this smaller inside belt back on, we're going to put it down in, and I really can't film this. My A/C compressor is over here, so we're putting it under that first, and then the crank pulley is over here, so we'll put it under that as well. Then the fun part of making sure that it's on those pulleys properly and pull it up some to the tensioner, and now we're going to put our ratchet handle up in here and get into the hole. Let's actually go from I know it's hard for you to see, I'm doing my best here. I'm pushing the ratchet handle down as far as I can, reach in here, grab hold of the belt, and pull it up onto the tensioner, I can see down in and make sure it's on the crank pulley correctly. I can see straight down and it's on the A/C pulley correctly and I let my tensioner back up.

Now I tighten up those two bolts, those two 13mm bolts. I'm going to speed it up while I'm tightening up those bolts and the tensioner applies the tension to the belt so you don't have to worry about that, you just tighten those 13mm bolts up into place and the belt is all set. Here's the front belt. So we went down around the crank and the alternator, then around the power steering pulley, and then pulled it up over that idler or tensioner pulley.

To put your new belt on, what I'm going to do is put it down in, and you want to make sure it goes down around your crank pulley. Your alternator pulley is way down there. It wants to go around your alternator pulley and then around your power steering pulley first, and now pulling it up. I pulled it up around my tensioner. We'll fast-forward a little bit again as we're just tightening up that tensioner bolt.

Now tighten it up so you can push it down probably just a little more than a 1/4 of an inch. Actually what happens as you tighten up this 15mm bolt on the pulley, it actually tightens the belt just a little more. Here you can kind of see, tighten it up. We can push it down a little bit, we'll tighten it up a little more than that. Now we'll tighten this nut on the pulley. Now we'll fast-forward through tightening that up. You want to get it nice and tight, as tight as you can with that wrench. After you tighten that up, what you want to do is start the car, run it a little bit, shut it off, and then check the tension on the belts again and make sure that they're still where you want them.
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