Power steering and A/C belt keeps riding up pulley?

Background: I picked up an abused but very strong running and rust-free '03 Blue Slicktop P5 to make into a daily driver. Have a white P5 that my wife and I bought brand new in 2002, recently downgraded to Parts Car due to inoperable rust.


I won't bore you with the details of this unexpectedly long journey, suffice to say that my nickname for the '03 is The Blue Lemon.

After I swapped a nearly-new A/C compressor to the '03 from the '02 parts car (with the correct belt for the diameter of the A/C pulley, as per old pro at the Mazda parts counter looking up the '02 VIN and getting me the right belt... no squealing!), I immediately had smoking belt because the power steering pump was locking up.
This was solved by swapping the power steering pump from the '02, a nice reman I had personally put on our old '02 a few years back.
During this, I found that the '03 car's P/S pump tensioner bracket was bent, probably as a result of the hard front-end hit it took at some point in it's checkered past. Fun trivia: some a-holes "fixed" the front smash with a Protege sedan bumper and headlights... with wood screws FML. Swapping the white bumper on improved the Blue Lemon 200%.

So, the tensioner bracket from the '02 parts car was also swapped to the '03 along with the pump and brand new crush washers.
Short test drive = fine.
20 miles on freeway to work = the belt rides halfway off the P/S pulley, giving me heart attack.

Belt is carefully re-tensioned.
Short test drive = fine.
20 miles on freeway to work = the belt rides halfway off the P/S pulley again!

As shown here, I shimmed the P/S pump outwards with 4 washers: two on inner bracket-to-pumpbody, rusty one on swing point, and one between tensioner bracket and pump's arm that bolts to tensioner.
Short test drive = fine.
20 miles on freeway to work = fine.
1 full week of 40 miles per day on freeway = dammit the belt is gradually riding up again!


Don't mind the broken motor mount, it's the wrong part from a manual trans car. I filled my original auto-trans-spec one off the '02 with silicone construction adhesive, it will go on when I do timing belt & waterpump.

The '02 pump and it's attached upper brackets are visually identical to the dead one off the '03.
The tensioner bracket off the '02 is visually undamaged, the one off the '03 is badly bent inwards, so I am certainly not putting it back on:




-----> So, why does my P/S & A/C belt want to climb outwards? <-----


Thanks in advance for any helpful ideas.

I'm holding off on doing complete timing belt & waterpump service until I get this belt locked down. Then it's Plasti-Dip time!

Perhaps the pulleys are not "square" to one another.

It might be out of alignment from the accident ??

Maybe try placing a straightedge against the pulleys edge to see if it is off kilter to the next pulley.

The bolts and engine attachment points might be bent ?

I'm not sure but I think I remember a guy that had the same problem.
He ended up having a "ring" welded to the edge of the pulley. It created a taller "wall" that the belt couldn't climb over.

Maybe check the bolt that holds the bracket to see if it wobbles in the hole through the engine.

If the bolt is sloppy, the whole bracket could twist out of proper alignment.

Catzilla said:

]

Don't mind the broken motor mount, it's the wrong part from a manual trans car...

Click to expand...

The big pin that reaches through the mount is a different length for the manual and auto transmission. The mount itself has a different orientation.

I'm pretty sure if you buy and a new mount that also comes with the pin then you can use either a manual or auto mount. (some mounts don't come with the pin and you are expected to insert your old one into the new mount)

pcb said:

I'm not sure but I think I remember a guy that had the same problem.
He ended up having a "ring" welded to the edge of the pulley. It created a taller "wall" that the belt couldn't climb over.

Click to expand...

Then he just invited more belt wear rubbing on that ring, band-aiding a symptom not addressing a root cause.

pcb said:

Maybe check the bolt that holds the bracket to see if it wobbles in the hole through the engine.

If the bolt is sloppy, the whole bracket could twist out of proper alignment.

Click to expand...

I like the way you are thinking!
I just now made a little sleeve using steel band from an old hose clamp, tapped it into the inboard end of the pivot bolt hole, tapped the pivot bolt through it, and snugged the pivot bolt down to be firm but allow the pump to pivot up and down.
Will post pics later.
This drastically minimized the ability of the pump to twist side-to-side.

However, even with the twist almost eliminated it still appears the entire pump-and-pulley is still sitting too far inboard: while pulling upwards on the pump to take up the belt slack, I can just barely see past the stupidly huge power steering lines that the belt is in fact bending slightly inboard going from the crank pulley up to the P/S pulley.

After lunch I'm going to remove and measure the pair of brackets that connect the pump body to the upper pivot. These control the lateral placement of the pump-and-pulley to the pivot housing on the engine (which, it should be noted, is a thick aluminum bracket bolted to the head). With luck I may be able to swap the '03 brackets back in play and get better alignment.

Just thinkin...
It may be this part of the bracket that is bent as well.



Perhaps you could swap these parts with the good one to see if it restores your alignment.

It would have taken a pretty hard hit to bend the adjuster mechanism... It may have bent the rest of the bracket too.

Catzilla said:

After lunch I'm going to remove and measure the pair of brackets that connect the pump body to the upper pivot. These control the lateral placement of the pump-and-pulley to the pivot housing on the engine (which, it should be noted, is a thick aluminum bracket bolted to the head). With luck I may be able to swap the '03 brackets back in play and get better alignment.

Click to expand...

(You posted while I was typing)

You might not be able to measure the difference..

Half a mm might create a few degrees of twist on the pulley.

Catzilla said:

I just now made a little sleeve using steel band from an old hose clamp, ...

Click to expand...

I did the same sort of thing for my shifter bushing at the bottom of my shifter.
The bushings were shot so I cut a few pieces of measuring tape and stuffed them in there as shims.
They're thin and already half rounded and made from a durable metal.

(I didn't even wreck the tape measure, I pulled the tape all the way out and disconnected it from the spring and cut from that end.
My tape measure is now a foot shorter.)

Catzilla said:

...
However, even with the twist almost eliminated it still appears the entire pump-and-pulley is still sitting too far inboard:

Click to expand...

If your bracket is bent and your pulley is twisting inward, then your pulley may appear too far inboard when eying it up.
If it is inboard I can't see it being off by the thickness of four washers.

Update:

The brackets are the same for their offsets, I have cheap calipers that I trust to about .005". My good Mitutoyo calipers that I trusted to .001" were stolen long ago.
I don't have the correct equipment here to measure the brackets for twist, but the '02 assembly never had belt tracking problems.

So, I simply added one more washer to each spot to arrive at a new total shim offset of approx .200" outboard.

Tightened up the belt, lock down the tensioner and pivot, and start the car up.

Watching the belt track with my finger on the throttle body to rev it up: there is definitely a deeper problem with this car, which is not surprising at all because since the day I started fixing up the Blue Lemon replacing every single broken thing has revealed another layer of broken underneath it grrrrrrrr.

The belt is not running smoothly. It's vibrating. At high revs it's fluttering between the crank and P/S, which I expect will lead to belt walk this week, so I have already stuck the 14mm socket wrench and 14mm ratcheting box wrench in the glovebox.
I suspect the crank pulley itself may not be correctly sitting on the crankshaft snout, so I'm now sure that when I do the timing belt I'm going to find 7 kinds of FUBAR underneath things.

Thanks for giving me tips, pcb!

What about swapping the entire power steering pump ?

The pulley itself might be bent on it's shaft.

If your crank pulley was off, you would think the alternator belt would be vibrating as well.

Catzilla said:

... I have cheap calipers that I trust to about .005"....

Click to expand...

Mine aren't that good...



But it cost three bucks and usually has to measure through a quarter inch or rust so they're good enough.

I dragged our original white P5 from Michigan to Nevada to Texas. Unfortunately it was already infected with metal mites.

Let me know if you want to road trip and pick up a clean chassis, these cars are disappearing as they get parted out.

But I can tell you wrenching on a Texas car is a beautiful thing - the bolts magically "unscrew" rather than snap off. I highly recommend it.

That sounds tempting...

I know that here, the phrase "Texas car" sure helps sell a car.

My concern is the cost...
I don't have much money and I don't know what this would cost me.

How much could I buy a chassis for and how much might it cost me to ship it ??
I wouldn't know where to start ??

As of Sept. 2018, Dallas/Fort Worth List Of Craigs:
A high-miles P5, complete, with dead motor is anywhere from $200 to $1000. Usually junkyards get these. I lost out on one because it was 200 miles away and I have a truck but no trailer.
Running driving P5: anywhere from $1200 to $4k depending on condition.

The very best way to do it is to fly down, buy a car in tip-top shape, and road-trip it home.
The next best way to do it is to own or rent a truck and a trailer. Car shipping is a cursed business.
You also may have issues with the border, but I trust you would research your required paperwork to import US spec cars.

Friend of mine sold his '64 Impala low rider to a gent from Kansas City who flew down, rented a 16 foot u-haul truck and a trailer, and trailered the car with an empty box back to KS.

I've heard that a US car isn't legal in Canada..
It needs daytime running lights at least and other stuff.

What I could do is find a car closer to home and make sure it's rust free, preferably at Krown rustproofing (which guarantees against rust through for the life of the car)

I'll look for something in the $2,000-$$4,000 range... Dropped off at my house.

Update:

Just checked my belt on lunch at work.
Belt looks nice and straight on the P/S pulley.

However I just now noticed that the outer rim of the pulley is significantly lower than the inner rim, meaning that the belt has far less "wall" to keep it in place during any flutter.
Will post pics of this oddity when I get home.

As the pulley is pressfit onto the pump shaft, this means I may be buying a new pump & pulley assembly if the belt riding still occurs.

What about swapping the whole pump and pulley from your parts car ?
It was working fine on the parts car.

This IS the pump and pulley from the white '02 parts car. It's a reman I bought off Rock Auto about 40k miles ago, I swapped it in an apartment parking lot in a desperate move to defeat belt squealing (before I learned about the two different A/C pulleys and two different belts ha ha).

The pump and pulley that came with the blue '03 began to intermittently seize up and smoke the belt immediately after I installed an A/C compressor and started the car (I bought this blue car with a dead bypassed compressor LOL). This afternoon I plan to examine closely it's pulley flanges for height. I doubt the pulley will come off the pump shaft without a hydraulic press that I don't have.