Ok, I have the old belt off, tensioner is locked to slack, etc.

I can not for the life of me get the new belt on. I have tried two different belts. The one I have now is 54.8" long but it's about a half inch or more short. WTF? I am screwed right now as I need to actually drive my car to work tomorrow. I thought the idea of slacking the tensioner was to give you room to get the new belt on. Not working. I've been wrestling with this thing for 1.5 hours, there is no way this belt is going on.

At this rate I may need to take a day off and have this thing towed to the dealer.

Please give me some advice before I lose my mind.

 

Are you on the second hole to lock the tensioner? The first hole might not give you enough room. When I installed my 15% pulley the new smaller size belt went right on. Pic below shows HEX wrench in second hole :

 

Yep, in the second hold for sure.

To throw salt in the wound, my special tensioner tool from outmotoring.com broke on the first use. Awesome. It's just one of the pins falling out, so I can still kinda sorta use it (with a lot of extra cursing when it falls apart half the time).

At this point... I'll give anybody in the No VA area $100 if you can come to my house today and get this (or any) fracking belt on the car. Send me a PM. I will be out of the house but back late this afternoon. I live in Centreville.

 

Belt slips on really tightly... Keep working it, it will go on.

As for the tool, this happens. Nothing a little spot welding can't fix.

 

What is the last pulley you are trying to put it on? You'll have a harder time trying to slip it over something with a lip, such as the harmonic damper or AC. I always slide it over the idler pulley. It will sort of 'roll' onto it, if that makes sense.

 

Jack the front of the car up so you can partially slide under it (use jackstands). Remove the splash guard. From below feed the belt around the pulleys, starting by looping the belt over the alternator, then under the idler, then over the crank. Now feed the belt around the top two pulleys while holding the bottom away from the AC compressor, giving yourself enough slack to feed it over the supercharger. Now the belt is where it wants to be except for the compressor. Check that the belt is properly seated and aligned to all of the pulleys except the compressor. Now work the belt over the compressor flange onto the compressor pulley. Push it on parallel to the pulley--don't try to start one side and then slip on the rest. You will have to struggle. If you absolutely can't get it on, have an assistant carefully pull on the tensioner tool while you slip the belt on.

 

If you have trouble using your tensioner tool you can do the same job with a 36" pry bar. Just back the tensioner bolt out about 1/2" and use that as a pivot point. I've never used a tensioner tool myself, this method has always worked for me. It's a lot cheaper than buying a tensioner tool also.

 

Which belt # are you putting on?!
Way back before I did my pulley, outmotoring sent me a '535 belt for my non pulley car....it was one tight sob to get on..too tight actualy, but I put the pulley on a few months later, so no-harm done. The belt tennsioner I got from them worked fine...maybe you got a bad one...and maybe the wrong belt....