Procedurally, it's not particularly hard, just a bit cramped -- assuming you are just doing the lower. If you don't have a tensioner tool, or at least a long handle ratchet, go get one. You can do the pulley swap without removing the accessory drive belt, if you are careful. Even so, I loosen it, just so I don't have to worry.

Since you have a 2015, and are doing the tensioner update, make sure you have the groove JLR tensioner, or have also bought the new tensioner mount.

I wouldn't take my experience as being indicative of normal. That said, aftermarket mods to a car are always a little bit of a crap shoot, and the tighter the tolerances the bigger chance there is for something to go awry.

 

As always, a picture is worth 1000 words.



Line laser is mounted on the supercharger pulley. Line is right down the idler ridge. You can see it start on the crank pulley ridge and then shift into the valley as it moves across the pulley. Note that this picture is with the stock pulley. It's possible that the line is just a hair off vertical on the idler pulley, in that picture. Hard to get a good picture. In the interest of avoiding confirmation bias, I've checked, checked and re-checked. It certainly appears that the crank pulley isn't square to the crank shaft.

Why? Could be it's always been that way. Could also be that the vibration damper is starting to separate. I lean slightly towards the former since it is there even when not under belt tension, but I can't be sure. Either way, it wouldn't be good for the front oil seal or front bearing to have that extra vibration. So down the rabbit hole we go. When I started all this work this winter, I was expecting the suspense to the problem child. I was expecting to find all sorts of bad rubber as I started digging. While I found a little, it turns out that the simple lower pulley replacement is the part that keeps on giving.

Right now, I have the VAP pulley and tensioner in place. A smooth lower idler should be arriving today and I have a single sided belt. That will go on, while I wait for the replacement damper assembly to arrive. I expect it to not squeak. I'll try and get some better video of the crank pulley and idler.

 

Since someone will ask, I will do the front crank seal while I have the damper off. I have the tools for both the damper and the seal on the way. So, if you are in the DFW area and need to access to the flywheel lock tool, the crank pulley removal kit, or the front seal tools -- I will have the whole kit, reach out.

 

@GerbilEngineer Some questions:

Just to confirm - this laser line picture is with the VAP parts installed?

Did you flash the ECU to stage 3 yet?

Were the belts quiet initially with the OEM setup prior to your upgrade journey?

Can you do a laser line comparison picture with the OEM parts installed?

And when you reinstalled the OEM parts earlier the squeak was still there? That is what is so confusing. I would assume reverting back to stock would solve the squeak.

You are definitely close to the solution...

 

That picture is with everything stock, except the upper super charger pulley. I'll try and get a good picture with the VAP pulley, later today.

As to the state of things prior to starting this journey, yes the belts were quiet. At least quiet relative to with the full VAP setup. I've gone back to stock tensioner and stock lower pulley. The belts are "quiet", though I can detect what sounds like the faintest of squeaking. Not audible in the cabin, but under the car you can make it out. Either that, or I'm just hearing the things that would fit in with the current presumed facts.

The short of it is I don't know exactly what the stock setup looked like and sounded like, up close, prior to starting. Just what going back to as close to stock as possible, afterwards, looks like.

I definitely think I see wobble in the stock lower pulley, which is what leads me to think that the VAP lower pulley may have just highlighted a latent problem.

The car has the full stage 3 tune, and transmission tune, applied.

I have confirmed all the dimensions on the VAP pulley and confirmed that it is square, so any wobble in it is definitely coming from the vibration damper mount.

Since, to the best of my knowledge, there should be no wobble/runout there, it's getting replaced as I can't trust it and the cost of it failing is very high.

 

Not sure if it's me, ( my system ) or not, but I'm not seeing any of your pictures!

 

It would be interesting if any others noticed this wobble. Next time I drive I will try and take a video of mine.

 

First... it runs, no squeaks:
Current setup:

VAP lower pulley
VAP upper pulley
VAP tensioner
Gates 38022 smooth lower idlers
Gates K080580HD single sided belt.

I didn't get any laser pictures with the VAP pulley. I need to put the belt on to torque the pulley bolts -- makes it easier to keep the crank from turning -- they were already wrench tight. I wasn't going to take it back off to take pictures.

But, I have video. The quality is quite crappy, but that may be part of the reason the wobble is easy to see. Watch the left side of the pulley.


Now, it's obviously slight, but it's there. Even a 1mm runout would be enough to have the belt almost a half a groove off as the pulley rotates. With a grooved idler holding that end firm, and very little distance from idler to pulley, that may be enough.

Others:

You can see the tensioner movement in the last video. It is much less pronounced now. This also makes some amount of sense. The movement you see now would be due just to the runout in the pulley assembly. Initially, you would have had the runout, combined with the belt jumping around in the grooves. Here is the original, with all VAP gear and the ribbed lower idler.


Its kind of hard to do a direct comparison since the last one is normal speed whereas the first is "slow-mo". However when I went to check the tensioner movement this evening, my first thought was "wow, that's way better". It was that noticeable in person.

So I have a full replacement vibration damper assembly on order -- who knows when it will arrive -- and the tools to install it. It will get put on. The question will be, assuming it even arrives in time, do I trust the current setup enough to wait till after race week, or do I leave the Jag in the garage and just take the Blackwing...

I will end the evening with a video that will make pretty much everyone smile though. It purrs... it growls... and it will roar.

 

They show up on my system, and on my work laptop, so I'm guessing you get to chase computer gremlins, while I chase car gremlins. Note: I chase computer gremlins to pay for chasing car gremlins.

 

Picture showed up this time! Apparently the Gremlins continue to play tricks !! Enjoy following your venture. Good Luck and hang in there!

 

The car has been driven some now. Got taken for an alignment and a little bit of a drive on Thursday. No unexpected excitement. There is still the slightest belt chirp on a cold start, when it is cool out -- we've been in the 40s and low 50s in the mornings (Fahrenheit). Goes away as soon the things warm up in the engine bay and/or outside. I have a replacement harmonic balancer assembly en-route, and I'll check runout on it, before I re-install. No stressing over the state of things now as the car runs well and drives well and doesn't show signs of tearing itself apart.

And then I had the drive today. We went out to my brother-in-laws for Easter lunch and took the Jag. It's about 50 miles each way and I needed to get some miles on it so I can get an emissions test done so I can renew the registration. I also wanted to get more that 10-15 miles on it so I could check the transmission cooler line leaks to see how bad they are (Found the leak -- 2017 R). The drive out was great. Car ran well and sounded wonderful. Heading home, a was well until we were around half way home -- got the dreaded "Restricted Performance" indicator. No CEL though. Surprisingly, the car will maintain 70+mph, even in restricted performance mode -- so long as the road is flat. After about 10 miles, got off and stopped at a gas station. It was a reasonable location to be able to leave the car if it decided not to restart. Also... needed gas too. It restarted fine and the rest of the drive home was uneventful. And here I was starting to feel like it might be ok to take racing in a couple of weeks.

To be clear, I'm 99.9% sure that it has nothing to do with the pulleys, but this thread has been as much about getting the car back running as it has about the actual pulley installs, at this point. So I figured a bit of an update was in order. Going to start a separate thread on what I found and future debugging on it.