Will This Belt Hack Get Us Home - Learn How Important Serpentine Belts Are

That's heavy-duty.

All right. So that didn't work. Come on, don't fail me now.

What's up, guys. I'm Andy, have you ever had a drive belt break while you're pretty far away from your house when you need to lunk the car home? Well, in this video, we're gonna try some hacks to try to get you home.

This video is intended for entertainment purposes only. Please do not try this at home. Here, we have the Chevy truck. We're gonna go out and drive it, pull over, cut the serpentine belt, and see if we can get back with one of these methods. Oh, hey I didn't see you there. So let's take a look at this belt system on this vehicle that the belt is still there. You have the crank pulley down below. So the belt is gonna be driven by the crank pulley, and it's gonna go up here and there's a tensioner. And then an idler pulley. We have the alternator. We have the power steering. And we have the water pump. Now on a different belt, you have the AC compressor. Now, if you're broken down on the side of the road and you need to get home, the AC compressor is not gonna be important. Neither is the tensioner pulley or the idler pulley. But you are gonna need the water pump to be spinning, and you want it spinning in the correct direction. The alternator's gonna be important. And the power steering pump, depending on the vehicle, some power steering pumps are more crucial.

Some vehicles ride fine without the power steering pump going, but most you're gonna need that spinning as well. Some vehicles have electric power steering, so you don't even have to worry about that. So, at the very least, you need a belt that goes around the crank pulley and the alternator. So if we take a look at the pulleys, the pulleys that are ribbed are gonna spin in one direction. And the pulleys that are flat are gonna spin in the opposite direction. So your crank pulley is gonna spin the same direction as the alternator and also the power steering pump. So you want to keep that in mind if you're routing zip ties or whatever you're routing instead of the serpentine belt.

Some of the reasons why you don't want to continue driving the vehicle if the serpentine belt broke, and the first is safety. If your power steering is gone, it's extremely hard to turn certain vehicles. So, you want to pull over as soon as possible for that. The next would be the alternator or the charging system. It's not gonna be working properly, you'll see a little battery light on. And your engine's just running off what's left in the battery. Now that may go on for another 5 minutes or 10 minutes. You don't know. But at any time your engine could just shut off. And if you're in the middle of an intersection or something, that's gonna be bad. And the last, which could cause probably the most damage is the water pump. If the water pump's not pumping coolant through the engine, the engine's gonna overheat and could cause some serious damage.

Right. We drove around a little bit. There's no turning back now. Send the rope around the crank up around the water pump over the alternator, and around the power steering. And there's not really a good way to secure these together, so I'm just gonna have to tie them together. It is a little stretchy, so that might help to our advantage. Trim the ends. I'm just gonna burn the ends. Keep it from frame. There we go. All right. Let's give it a try.

Look at that. It's working. It doesn't look like the water pump's spinning too fast. And the water pump's slowing down. So that's not gonna be good. Yeah. So, the water pump's not spinning. So that's not gonna work for us. If the rope was a little bit stretchier, that might've worked a little better. But as you could see, the rope is starting to fray already, and it's only been running for about a minute and that's it. So that's not gonna work and it stopped spinning the water pump. It wasn't sticky enough. Maybe if we wet the rope down, maybe that would work better, but either way, that's a bust. So that's not gonna work.

Now we're gonna try rubber bands. I'm gonna loop these together, just like this. This may take some time. Now, I strung 10 of these together. I'm gonna wrap this around. I'm gonna go as far back as I can. Then I'm just gonna have to tie that together at the end somehow. All right. So, I double-knotted that. Make sure that's on the inside. Now I'll just trim the excess and we're gonna make a couple more of these. So I've got three bands of 10 on there. They're a little bit loose, I wonder if I could have made them a little bit tighter. And maybe if I put one more on, that might work a little better, but let's give this a try. Here we go. That's not looking good. Oh, one's behind there. Oh, we're going to lose that other one. Oh, that's not good. All right. So that didn't work. So that didn't work. And it kind of clogged the alternator a little bit. All right. There we go.

Now we're gonna try duct tape. The thing is the roll is a little too wide. So what I'm gonna actually do is cut the roll in half so that it's about the width of a serpentine belt. So I'll just take a blade and just slice down the middle. Now I got two rolls of duct tape. And we'll give this a try. I don't think this is gonna be easy wrapping this around. So, let's start here. All right. That's the end of the roll. I don't think it's gonna make a difference to add another role. I think it's either gonna work a little bit or it's not gonna work at all. So let's give it a try. Oh, that didn't work.

This is our last shot. Otherwise, we're walking. I'm gonna start with the skinnier wire ties and I'm actually gonna go from the crank straight to the power steering pump because I don't want that to slip. So we'll just put these together. And I'm gonna do it on the inboard side. I'm gonna need one more. All right. So that's pretty tight. Now I'll trim the excess. All right. Now we'll use the bigger ones. Ans just tighten these up. And trim the excess. All right. I think that's everything. All right. Perfect. Check that out. Hopefully, they don't cross. But everything's spinning, the water pump's spinning, the alternator, and my power steering pump. See if I have power steering. That's too bad, I don't really have power steering. So it's slipping a little bit. Let's see how far we can go. So I'm actually getting power steering, like moments of power steering. Either that or it's just the inertia of the truck or the ability while it's rolling. And it seems like it's staying right at 210 degrees.

All right. Temp's going up too high. We're gonna have to shut it down. Just to see if we can get some added friction on the water pump to keep it from spinning...I mean, keep it from slipping, we're gonna try putting some rubber bands around it. See if that will help us out. It's like it's spinning pretty good. It's working. It's still working. My alternator's charging and my water pump's pumping. There it is pumping. I just have to sit here at 3,000 RPM with the heat full blast. It's hot as heck in here, but alternator's still charging and the water pump's still pumping. Come on, don't fail me now. Go right over it?

Yeah.

All right. Are you sure?

Ah, sweet.

It made it?

Yeah.

Good. There we go. We made it.

So it seems like wire ties and rubber bands in combination is the winner. And that's what got us back to the shop nice and safe. Now, a couple of other ideas we had was using some tie-down straps. We could have cut the ends off and tried to tie it around, but that would have worked probably similar to the rope. Another guy mentioned using a seatbelt, which I think is a horrible idea. Seatbelts are a lot more expensive than drive belts. You might as well go buy a new drive belt. So this was kind of a cool and fun hack to try and see if it actually worked. By no means would I recommend getting on the highway with something like this, but it was just cool to see that it actually worked and it's definitely not a repair. So if you have any other ideas or you've used something in place of a drive belt before and it's worked out for you, leave me a comment below. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you subscribe to our channel and ring the bell. Turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our videos.