First the crankshaft pulley broke, without any early sign.
Stranded far from home in middle of night, got towed to a nearby rip-off shop who charged me a crazy amount to change pulley + belt + belt tensioner.

Job was done without any form of care, and beside various damages to the engine bay the root cause of the failure went undetected: culprit was a leaky crankshaft seal that got the pulley oiled up, the rubber in the middle got degraded by the engine oil and voila`.

How I found out? It almost happened a second time!
This round tho there were early signs: the belt started to squeak like crazy every cold start so we lifted the thing up and found the already off-centered main pulley damaged by the now larger oil leak.
Changed seal, changed pulley, changed belt. This time around the job got done at a shop I trust, so the whole area got cleaned up from the oil/bolts checked/ etc etc

All good, except for my wallet and my patience.

Well, it is not over! It did run fine for a while, now squeaks like crazy again!!!

What can it be?
Here are my hypotheses:

-There is oil left on some pulley, belt got contaminated and degraded ---> change belt & wash first the pulleys with soapy water

-The main seal may be leaking again. Easy to verify but then what could it be? Why the hell would a main seal be "pushed out"?

-Something else?!!

I`m sort of in despair, my justa is kept like a jewel, even spent lots of €€€ to mod it with the 6 speed box and now what? A dumb belt keeps me going back to the shop? Nono... Help!

 

I don't know the pulley routing of the justa but if there are idlers, I would check them. It might not be an oily belt, could be a dry belt, most autoparts have a belt dressing. The dressing is cheap and you never know.

 

No idlers on the justa, just h2o pump, aircon, alternator and tensioner.

We are goint to put some "anti squak cream" on it tomorrow but I do not exclude a belt change + tensioner mod to increase tensione. If this will not fix i'll be removing the whole assembly and replacing it with a tooth-type, as it should be from day 0.

 

It would be most useful if you list the mileage of these episodes. Without it one can infer many ways, and most likely Mini's are crap. Some photos also would worth more than many paragraphs of text, especially those longer than War and Peace . Oh, and then there are those type like they are texting and sexing. Kudos the Euros sign giving us some ideal where you reside. Let me guess. South of France.

 

This made me laugh.... you guessed I`m from south of France because of the charming sexing writing? Well turns out I`m from northern Italy and we have an ongoing competition with our cousins on the other side of the Alps at who`s better at it

Anyway, first failure at 140k km, second failure at 170k km and not at 180k is getting squeaky again.

If it is again an oil loss we will investigate it, if there is no oil I have no idea about what could be killing my belts. Basically I`m looking for educated guess about this second one. If it is an oil leak that`ll be another story

 

Don't flatter yourself. By South of France I meant countries South of France. I could have written one of the Schweine-Länder (pig countries) given the Eurozone economic crisis, but afraid of being called out as mean people sux.

Though when it comes to charming romantic love gain and love loss, Italy does not play second fiddle to France. Puccini cranked out more sappy soapy opera than any with catchy love duets.

 

No calling out, just laughing. Just please do not decide that we need some freedom dropped from the sky

 

Nice jab there, and hit the spot too.

 

Once upon a time I was a proud USA resident, I have infinite mocking material at hand

 

It is too easy to drink the Kool-Aids served to you by the domestic "press" especially in the smartphone age what promotes dumb, narcissistic, and lazy people. I like to look at my own country from the rest of the world's perspectives to get a more balanced view. Sad to say, the more neutral press that I frequent are outside of the most powerful nation on earth.

nub politics b4 this post got censored.

 

​​​​​​
Good of you to reckon the pitiful condition that you mass media are in. Bad news, ours are not a tad better

​​​​​​To put it simple: the average European (I travel Europe & USA, so I can't tell first-hand about people more east) has a GREAT image of the average American dude (being the grandiks of the ones who saved our a$$ in ww2 is a good starting point for a reputation) and a rather terrible image of your government (both sides and thru the years, I'm not referring to any specific president/party).

That's to put it really simple but it's pretty much it





Aaanyway, belt: a tad of "magic cream" fixed the noise but it looks really worn out. At first glance seems that something is misaligned, in Jan we'll lift it to find out what's the story. It can be really anything, first thing we need to find out which one is the pulley out of the plan, you can really see the belt not working straight

 

Seems we found the problem.
Things looked not aligned, to our surprises it was the TWO brand new chain tensioners that we experimented with that needed 2mm on offset. Added 3 washers between tensioner, problem gone. At least for now.

Is the R50 belt supposed to have some sort of plastic "shield" to protect it or it is jus "free" to see the tarmac even in its lowest point on the a/c compressor?

 

Its free unless you consider the front belly pan near the AC compressor.

 

Front belly pan? Do you have a part n. please?

 

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