V-belt quality

[Peter Orban]

Hello Everyone,

Thanks for the comments on the V-belt!

I can see most of you guys have already moved on to nicer cars ;-)

The car is a '91 VW Golf, so it is an "old school" v-belt, just one v-section, not a serpentine poly-belt.
The belt drives the water pump and the alternator, and with the alternator one can adjust the belt tension. No separate tensioner.

Interesting comment from George, that matches my experience!
I thought Continental was the OEM for VW! I will check my '88 German built Jetta, I have the original belt in the trunk as spare. (Only 66KM (110KKm) on the car.)

Before the Conti belt we had on a no-name FLAP v-belt. It was a full section belt, no saw-tooth like notches. I replaced it as it was jumping up and down. I thought that we had a busted pulley, but it was because of the inaccurate, changing section of the v-belt. The Conti belts run true, except they seem to stretch!

About the "nicer" cars. It is fine as long as there is nothing wrong with them, but I trade any day working on my '03 V6 Passat to working on our older VWs. The newer cars were not designed for easy maintenance! Just think about the "service position" of the bumper...

Thanks for listening,

Peter




________________________________
From: "quattro-request at audifans.com" <quattro-request at audifans.com>
To: quattro at audifans.com 
Sent: Thursday, January 3, 2013 3:00:02 PM
Subject: quattro Digest, Vol 111, Issue 4
 

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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2013 02:01:47 -0500
From: George Selby <gselby4x4 at earthlink.net>
To: quattro at audifans.com
Subject: Re: V-belt quality
Message-ID: <E1TqeoE-0003ZY-AR at elasmtp-spurfowl.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

At 10:29 PM 1/2/2013, you wrote:
>Now I put on a new belt, also the same Continental make. It was 
>tight when I put it on, and now, a couple of days later it is not so tight.
>Is that normal? I don't think so!

I always had trouble with Continental alternator belts on both my VW 
Jetta and Audi 200.  In fact, the inability to keep a new alternator 
belt on my 200 for more than a couple 1000 miles is party what led to 
it being scrapped last year.  I had problems with aftermarket 
Continental belts on my Jetta, too, had better luck with Genuine VW belts.

George Selby 

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End of quattro Digest, Vol 111, Issue 4
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