Hey guys. I bought my '95 Cherokee about 6 months ago and have put maybe 4,XXX miles on it. When I bought it I had a mild squeak so I tried to put belt dressing on it and it got louder. I replaced it with a new one and just yesterday it started doing it again. I tried the old soap method and it got quiet for mayve 5 minutes then came back. What is causing this to keep coming back and any ideas on how to get rid of the noise without buying yet another belt?

 

check the smooth pulleys like the water pump pulley or idler pulley you may have to tae a flapper wheel or wire brush with some brake clean to them they may have built up on them from the old belts. also try tightening the belt up a lil more

 

Ill give that a try. I did notice the flat side of the belt almost has a glazed look to it.

 

The belt needs to be pretty damn tight.

 

Im just affraid over over tightening it. I did that on on old Fox Body I had and it made a whinning noise so I had to loosen it up. I suppose I can do the same in this case.

 

For every 6 inches of free belt you should have under a half inch of travel,

 

Mine is doing something similiar, although I have found out the squeaking goes away the more I use it and last longer the longer it sits. Moral of the story is "Go jeeping every day".

I have never seen a serpentine belt that doesn't work on spring tension. Since it's hard to judge pretty darn tight, is there a fastening spec that the tensioning nut should be held down to? Since the torque applied to the bolt should directly equate to tension applied to the belt, shouldn't there be a relative torque range that should put the belt in it's ideal condition? Making exception for worn out parts and rusty fasteners of course.....

 

It is ridiculous how stupid tight our XJ belt has to be. Like said before, make sure that all the pulleys are clean. Also, while the belt is off, spin the pulleys by hand and make sure that they all spin freely. Don't ever use belt dressing on the serpentine belt. It does no good and just gunks things up.

 

I recently changed out my alternator and belt, I thought it was right enough but then it started squeaking about 3 days later, I retightened it and made sure it was super tight!

 

The first thing you need to do is take off the belt and give it a good washing and get off all of the belt dressing you put on it. That crap is NOT meant to be applied on serp belts. It will cause them to fail prematurely and will cause them to squeak even more. If it's an old belt you would be best off changing it out with a new one. Like others have mentioned they do have to be really tight to get rid of the squeak.

 

For the belt, wash it in a bucket of soapy water and then rinse well. While the belt is still off, clean all the pulleys with brake cleaner.

What brand of belt did you install?

 

Clean or replace the belt, and tighten the tensioner good and tight. Went through this recently myself, and in the end the only solution was a new belt. Hasn't squeaked once since replacing the belt.

 

Ok guys, so like I said the belt is newer. Maybe 6 months old. I replaced the previous one for the same reason. Well I tried everything that was mentioned above and no luck. I tried twice actually. Took the belt off, made sure all the pulleys were free spinning (ones that should be), cleaned each pulley, put it back on and happened again and worse. So I tried one more time and again it happened and sounded like death. So, since cleaning it obviously didn't work I messed around with a bar of soap again. When I start the car and run the bar of soap up against the edge of the belt (edge closest to the motor) it stops...briefly. So I said the hell with it and grabbed some silicon spray, sprayed the edge of the belt....silence. Drove my 20 miles to work without a sound. I dont know why the back edge would be the only spot causing it though. Seems like it was probably the other belts issue too. I dont know how to avoid it and I dont want to buy a new belt every 6 months. I guess silicon for now will have to do.

Any other thoughts on what could be causing this?

 

Make sure that all of the pulleys are lining correctly if so more then likely your belt is still to lose. Like we have been telling you the belt on the 4.0 has to be stupid tight.

 

Well the bolt on the powersterring that you would use to move th powersteering tighten the belt up is 100% frozen so I just used a crowbar, got a ton of leverage and moved the powersteering as far as I could, then tightened it down. Not sure how else to get it any tighter. If I try anymore on that bolt it will snap, Im sure of it.