How to Replace Harmonic Balancer 2007-10 Hyundai Elantra

Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2007 Hyundai Elantra. I'm going to be showing you a fairly simple job, replacing the harmonic balancer. If you need this or any other part, you can always check us out 1aauto.com, thanks.

Okay, so right here, this is our belt that powers our alternator and our water pump. That also goes down around the crank or the harmonic balancer where we're going to be taking off. Okay, so we're going to need to take the tension off of this belt. To do that, the adjustments on the alternator, you've got this bolt right here. This is a anchor bolt. This bolt right here is the adjustment bolt, and then down bottom there, see if I can get my pointer down there. All the way down there. There's another 12 millimeter nut that's also an anchor bolt. Right down there. That might be easier to get to from the bottom. It can be done from the top as well. But what you need to do is loosen that bottom one, loosen this top anchor bolt, and then you can go ahead and de-adjust the alternator right there. So that's what we're going to do.

I'm going to go for the bottom one first because it's the hardest to get to. You don't have to remove this fully, you just have to have it loose enough to be able to rock the alternator or pivot it. I'm going to do this anchor bolt right here, staying with my 12 millimeter. Once again, you don't have to remove it fully. Just need it to be loose enough. Okay, there we are. Now I'm going to switch tools. Now I'm going to take a 12 wrench because it's easier to get in here. I'm going to turn this to the left. There we are. I've got that up and out of the way now. Could try giving the belt a tug. That pulls the alternator, so there we are. Now there's no tension on this belt. I'm clear to remove the belt. I'm going to be replacing this belt, but it's always a good idea to inspect it either way and of course hold onto it so we can compare it to our new belt.

So I just wanted to show you the original belt on this vehicle. Here it is. This is the rib side. The part that runs inside the pulleys. You can see how deep these grooves are or the ribs. They go in very far. Odds are this vehicle had a very loud belt squeal. The deeper these are, that means the more worn the belt is. It will also be very thin and so you'll get more belt squealing in this way. Here we have our brand new belt. I'm not sure if you can see the difference in the thickness of these, but you can feel it. If you had it in your hand, you would say wow Len, there's a big difference. I'll turn it, try to show you the rib side in comparison.

As you can tell, the ribs on this side aren't nearly as deep as the ribs on this side, and this is ... It's still nice soft rubber. This won't squeal. This right here is getting all hard and the ribs are very deep. So this is going to squeal. We'll get rid of this belt. We're going to go ahead and install a brand new belt on this vehicle. I just wanted to show you that. We'll move along.

Something you want to check before you go ahead and install it, is just to make sure that the belts are approximately the same length. If you have one that comes all the way out this far, then obviously it's not the same belt. They come pretty close. The old belt's probably pretty stretched at this point. It's been around since probably 2007, so let's try this one right here. So now it's time to go ahead and take off this plastic shield right here. There's a bolt located over here and then theoretically there should be a bolt located over here somewhere and this shield should continue. This one's missing half as you can tell, so I'm not gonna worry about this bolt that's missing. I'm going to find the other bolt. There's one here and there should be one there as well, but it is what it is. So I'm going to take out the one bolt that is holding on what's left to this shield. Spray it down a little bit. Here we go.

10 millimeter. Get that out of the way. Now we have clear view of our harmonic balancer, which is right here. We're going to blast this off of here. So this right here, you can either use a seven eighths or a 22 millimeter. I'm gonna use my half inch air gun and I'm going to turn it out counter-clockwise. Easy peasy. We'll set this aside. We'll move along. We've got our new harmonic balancer and our old harmonic balancer. Generally speaking, what you want to do is you want to try to eyeball it, try to compare it real quick. Make sure you're dealing with the same beast, right.

I can't get it up in there and check it out 100% but I can get it fairly close and I can feel that the diameter is approximately the same. I can feel that it has a rib on the inside right here and a ribbed area on the outside. That would be where your AC belt would ride, would be the inside. This particular vehicle does not have AC hooked up to it, so I don't have an AC compressor or an AC belt to remove. Your vehicle may, in which case you would have to remove that as well.

So I'm looking at it. To me it looks about the same. It's got the keyway notch there. Keyway notch. It's got both ribs like I was telling you about the both ribbed areas for your AC belt and your alternators/water pump belt. This looks like it should be good to go. So let's get this out of here. So I'm going to take my bolt. I'm going to start it back in. I'm going to go probably about halfway in here, okay. I'm going to go more. I want to make sure that I have plenty of threads into my crank. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to use a harmonic balancer puller tool and it's just got little grooves here, little teeth, okay. And a little punchy thing in the middle there. That's going to drive up against that bolt and it's going to allow me to pull out the harmonic balancer.

Once we get it so it breaks free from the crank itself, it should come out fairly easily at that point. Just snug this up by hand real quick. Sure we're not going to hit any body parts here. That seems pretty decent. There we are. Okay, so now when we're using this tool, it's a good idea to use your seven eighths or 22 millimeter and hold that crank nut so it can't turn because as we turn this, it's going to start putting pressure on the crank bolt and it could turn it in on you. And then you'll have that bottomed out and you'll be trying to pry the harmonic balancer off and it's just going to be laughing in your face. Wear your safety glasses, of course. Feels like something good's happening here. Yup. Okay, feels pretty good. I'm going to go ahead and loosen this a little bit here.

I'm going to take off this bolt right here. Now that I've broken the harmonic balancer free from the crank, I don't have to worry so much about damaging the crank with my tool. All right, so we're going to have to do a little bit of cranking here to get this all the way out. So I'm just going to take it back down. Ears are catching onto the harmonic balancer and the center is in the hole. All right, you want to play rough. Everything's harder on video. Tell you what? Let's see if I can crank this down a little bit. It should be pulling the harmonic balancer off of the crank at this point. At some point it's going to actually let go and want to fall down, so keep that in mind.

There we are. Now we've removed our harmonic balancer. So now that we have that off, I just want to show you guys something neat. Slide this off of here. Just a little 10, and there we are. Look in here. This belt right here, it's your timing belt. We don't want to do anything with that. That would be a project for another day, but you could take a peak at it, make sure that it's in good condition. This one almost kind of looks like it's a little bit worn. The teeth are worn down right to pretty much the wear bar inside the belt there, so it might be a good idea for this person to replace that at some point. I'm not going to worry about it today. I'm just going to go ahead and put this back on there.

We'll take a closer look at our harmonic balancer, make sure that the new one matches up with the old one and we'll continue with the install. We're going to hold the two of them up next to each other. I'm just going to take them. I'll go like this. You can tell it looks about the same diameter that way. Go like this, this ribbed area looks like it's about the same diameter. We'll get the same key hole slot. Let's install it. So if you need this or any other part, you can always check us out 1aauto.com. Thanks.

We've got our new harmonic balancer. We're going to slide it up so we can align the key way with the key position on the crank. See if we can wiggle it on there as far as possible. There we are. We're going to get our crank bolt. You don't need any threadlocker. I'm just going to bottom this out, there we are. Now we can move on to the next step. I'm just going to use my ratchet, 22 or seven eighths socket and I'm just going to tighten this down. There is a torque specification for it, so once you feel as though it's bottomed out and right about there really because we're turning the crank at this point. We're going to go ahead and try to torque that down. I'll get the torque spec for you.

The torque for this, there's a minimum of 115 and the maximum of 123. The problem that I have with that is that how can you torque this without the crank spinning? There's probably ways of getting it to not spin. The best thing that I'm going to do though is I'm just going to grab my air gun. I'm going to give it a little blast, but if you can figure out how to torque it and you want to, 123 foot-pounds. Here we are. Perfect.

So we've got what's left of our shields. There's a bolt there. There should be one here and there should be one someplace all the way up here. I'm going to put it in the one that I took out, line it up with my bolt hole hopefully. Try and get my head in here. Feel it. Okay. I'm going to snug that up with my 10 millimeter. There we are. Make sure it's not anywhere near the pulley or where the belt's going to ride. This is going to help prevent stuff from getting on in there. So we can go ahead and clean this down if you want if it's a real mess. If it's not, don't worry too much about it. Let's bring the vehicle back down. We'll get the belt on there. Time to get the new belt on. I'm just going to slide it down in between here. I'm going to get it started on the top pulley there. Go around the alternator. There we are. Perfect. Now we're going to go down inside the wheel well and we'll try to slide over the harmonic balancer pulley.

My belt. Here we are. Feels like it's 100% around this. Check the top again real quick, sitting perfectly. Sitting perfectly. Wonderful. Okay. We're going to take the alternator, apply a little bit of pressure. Grab a small pry bar here. All I want to do is try to get this belt, try to get the alternator to move. What I do when I go like this and I push the alternator towards the front of the vehicle, I'm applying more pressure on the belt. If I go like this, I'm relieving pressure on the belt. Okay. When you put this belt on, it's important to remember, you don't want it super tight. You also don't want it this loose, this right here, that's too loose. Even though it's a brand new belt and you did a great job, it's definitely too loose.

Okay. So you're going to want to tighten it. Once you have it tight though, you want to make sure that you can take that belt and you can twist it a little bit. Okay. Where this isn't a very big space in between here and here, you really shouldn't be able to twist it very much. But down lower where there's a longer gap between the two, you should be able to take that belt and give it a fairly good twist. All right, so I'm just going to go like this and get my adjuster. We're going to have to take out that adjuster bolt a little bit further to get it so it lines up. So I'm going to turn that out a little further using my 12 millimeter wrench. All right, let's see if that's far enough.

Give the alternator a little push. That sets over. Very nice. As you can tell, we still have too much movement with our belt there. So I'm going to go ahead and snug it up a little bit more. Go back to my 12 millimeter. I know it seems crazy because I just finished loosening it up all this time. Give this a little push, a little tug. We'll go just a little bit more. There isn't very much gap right here, so the amount of tension that I have there, I should have it a little bit tighter than that.

Of course, there's always room for adjustment. Who knows? Once we start this up, you might notice that we need to either tighten it or loosen it again anyway, so I think that that feels much better. We'll give it a try. I'm going to go ahead, grab my 12 millimeter again. For the trial, all I'm going to tighten is this top one and then once I realize that it's exactly where I want it to be, that's when I'll go ahead and make sure that I tighten up everything. Feels good. Let's get our tools out of the way. We'll start it up.

So we ran it. We're making sure that the belt stayed inside the pulleys right where we put it. It's not off by a tooth. If your belt was hanging off all the way over here and you could see one of the teeth on the pulley, well you know you're off by a tooth. I'm going to take a peek at the bottom one there. The harmonic balancer feels perfect. I didn't hear any noise from the belt, so I would say we're good to go. All right, now that we know that the belt's properly adjusted, I'm just going to go ahead and tighten up this bottom bolt. It's easy to forget, but it's important not to, okay.

So just make sure that it's tight. Here we are. That feels good. Perfect. Great job everybody. So if you're replacing the belt, obviously you didn't have to remove the wheel. I did for video purposes. All you'd have to do really is just turn the wheel. If that gives you enough room to get in here and you can do what you need to do. Perfect. If it didn't, well take the wheel off, put the wheel back on, torque the wheel down to 80 foot-pounds when you're done.

Thanks for watching. Visit 1aauto.com for quality auto parts shipped to your door. The place for DIY auto repair. And if you enjoyed this video, please click the subscribe button.