Problem Solving – Where Do These Fan Belts Go?

I helped a friend of mine with some car repair problem solving one day. He had taken off all of his fan belts and a couple of pulleys in order to replace his old worn belts. When he came to the point of putting the new belts on, all he had to look at was the front of his engine and a couple of hubs hanging out there. Since all the fan belts were nearly the same size, he had no idea of which ones went where.

Here is how such a problem can be solved if you run into it.

Reinstall pulleys on the hubs, at least temporarily, and then use the “trough” of the pulleys as a type of sighting mechanism. Simply determine where one trough is aiming itself to indicate alignment. This, with knowledge of the length of the fan belts, should help you identify pulley sets. The only remaining problem is to figure out which fan belts go with which set of pulleys.

One way to determine if a fan belt fits a pulley is to check to see how the belt fits into the trough. The belt should fit such that it’s cradled in the trough to make good contact with the sloping sides and be nearly flush with the outer ridges of the pulley. Sitting too deep in the trough or riding too high up on the sloped sides of the pulley indicates a poor fit, and eliminates that belt from consideration with a particular pulley set.

Once you find which belts match with a particular pulley set, then you can start looking for proper circumference of the belt. If it’s impossible to get the belt on, then you have the wrong belt. If it’s loose, then you have the wrong belt. If it’s a challenge to set on, you probably have the right belt.

Another way to avoid such a problem is to make a sketch or take a photo of the configuration of the belts and pulleys before you remove them.

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Clair Schwan enjoys problem solving, and finds it to be a common task for the self reliant among us. One of the keys to problem solving is to avoid creating the problem in the first place.