.......because I'm really big on preventive maintenance. Silly me!




My XF (non SC) doesn't have a lot of miles on it, but it's now 6 years old, and since my wife and I travel a bit with it, I thought I'd toss a new serpentine belt on it. Don't want to break down "on the road". All I can say, after completing this job is WOW...........because this forum most likely wouldn't allow me to print what I really think!


Long story short, I spent around 90 minutes wrestling the OE belt off, and then reversing the process, to get the new belt installed. The main issues, as I see it:
A) Due to a lack of work room, you're doing a lot of the work "blindly".
In other words, once you get your arms in and around the pulleys,
they block you view of what you have to do;


B) There's a metal line directly in front of the harmonic balancer, which
prevents you from slipping the belt forward, and off the pulley. You
have to "twist" the belt off the pulley and between the line and the
pulley, to get it out;


C) The tensioner pulley doesn't face outward, it faces the engine. As you
release the tension from the belt, you cannot simply slide the belt
"forward", toward you, and off the pulley. It goes "rearward", toward
the engine, where you again have to "twist" the belt, to get it between
components, to free it from the engine;


D) And as you're doing this, your arms are scraping against every surface
in the front of the engine compartment. By the time I was done, my
forearms looked like had a fight with a mad cat.




And just in case anybody else wants to go through this insane exercise, you first have to remove the upper engine cover, to allow you to access the clamp that holds the intake hose to the throttle body, loosen the clamp, unplug the electrical connection for the MAF, remove the three plastic pins that secure the air intake "elbow" to the radiator support, loosen the retaining bolt for the air filter box, and remove all of that, as an assembly.

 

Sounds painful but props to tackling that job on your own. I used to do a lot of the maintenance on my cars until I lacerated my wrist really bad on the undertray of one of my old Tundras (whoever owned it before me used an impact wrench on the oil drain bolt for some reason and it broke free after a lot of effort). Now, with the little bit of free time I have it's not worth it for me to spend it getting shredded up when I can pay someone else to do it.

 

I had a similar story after replacing mine on my former Lincoln LSV8. What was a 10 minute job on my old Mark 8 turned into 2 hours of trying to maneuver that stupid little belt. Not looking forward to trying it on the Jag!

 

Funny you should mention the Lincoln LS. Prior to getting the XF in 2009, we had a 2000 LS V8. We had that car for 9 years, so I'm reasonably certain that I must have changed that belt at least once, during that time. I don't remember it being as difficult as the XF.


I'm not positive, but I thought that I read somewhere the XF has a hydraulically powered cooling fan, which quite possibly might be the metal line in front of the balancer, that I referred to in the first post. Since my LS was a first year car, I think it had an engine driven fan, so that obstacle wasn't in the way.

 

I assume you don't do much mechanic work?
.
.
.

 

Who, ME???




I've been working on my own cars since the late 1960s, and was involved with several race cars in the late 70s, early 80s. The intent of my original post was to illustrate how even what should be a simple task, has become close to an impossibility, on newer cars.

 

I'm gonna have my serp belt, idler and tensioner replaced this month with my own parts that I'm supplying to my mechanic. It'll be 3 hours labour just to get at the belt so replacing one or all is the same labour. I thought the quote was nuts but seeing how buried the belt is, it's not so unreasonable.