knocking on wood as i type this

so, in theory this is the last bit on mechanical difficulty for a while…

…but to play it safe, re-read the title.

nothing says what’s going on like pictures, so let me re-cap what happened under the hood as i drove home on thursday (from what i can gather):

noise i’ve been hearing under the hood for a while was the bearings going out on the idle pulley on the belt, which resulted in all this getting shot backwards:

that’s the plastic outside of the pulley, the metal inside, a couple of the dozen or so ball bearings i recovered, a bit of the belt that got shredded, and the cap that bmw uses to keep dust out – for all you tree-hugging types, i DID recycle the cap and put it on the new pulley since it didn’t come with one. all of this was recovered from the splash guard under the engine when i pulled it all apart…

to show how much this thing tore itself apart, look at this shit:

that’s what i pulled off the car versus what was SUPPOSED to be there…after i unwrapped the belt from around it. problem was lack of said belt meant that a special tool was needed to pull the fan, which i was able to talk autozone into ordering for me, and allowing me to return, so all i had to do was come up with two bills to loan them and we were good to go (i mentioned “fan removal” in friday’s bit thinking i could get around but…yeah…well…not so much) so the car was garaged from thursday night till tuesday afternoon, and i found out that once the tension is gone the tensioner raises up into the pulley that was missing and the friction ground the smooth surface to this:

so that had to be replaced as well. between both pulleys and the belt i sunk around a buck and a half, and again many thanks to my future wifey (yeah, i said it) the ufc for hauling my ass around so i could earn the dough to do this…now i just need to order that tool just to play it safe for next time since i now (in theory) can wait the week and some change for it to arrive!