How to Replace Serpentine Belt 2003-08 Toyota Matrix

Remove the top engine cover. You'll have a 10-millimeter nut there and you should have one right here. Now, if you were to look down along the passenger side of the engine, you're going to be able to see the tensioner. You're going to see that it's a piston. Following it along, we're going to make our way right over to here. If you were to use a 19-millimeter socket and turn it clockwise, you'll be able to squish this piston, and then, of course, you'll be able to remove the belt from your pulleys. It's kind of a tight space, but you can do it. Okay. I'm gonna turn this nice and slow because it's under pressure. That's compressing the piston. Now, we'll go ahead and get our belt right off of here and slowly release it. Take a quick note of your belt routing. Once you've done that, go ahead and get the belt off of here.

Now, it's time to install the belt in the vehicle, put it on in the same route that you removed it. Slide that onto the water pump. Perfect. Now, before we go ahead and remove our tool from the tensioner, just double-check the belt, make sure it's sitting inside all of the grooves going around the grooved pulleys. And of course, it's sitting along the top of the smooth pulleys as well, and, of course, make sure that everything's settled as it should. This looks really great. So, it's time to move along. Let's go ahead and get our cover back on here. Just line it up with the studs, put on your mounting nuts, snug it right up. Do the same to the other one. Okay. So the next thing we need to do at this point is to go ahead and start up the vehicle. We're going to run it for approximately 10 seconds, and then we're going to turn it back off. We want to come back out and make sure the belt's still sitting on all the pulleys as it should. If for some reason you notice that it seems like it's walking off, you need to, of course, fix that before you continue running the vehicle. All right. Now that we've run it, let's go ahead and take a peek at that belt. Just make sure it's sitting like it should. This looks great. Next step, take it for a road test.