I have a 2005 Nissan Murano that just passed the 100,000 mile mark. I took it in for a tuneup and spent $1300 fixing numerous things.
Now just two months after the tuneup, when I start the car in the morning or after it’s been sitting for a long time, it makes a horrible screechy noise for a few seconds and then stops. The car runs fine.
Any idea what this is? I know next to nothing about cars and an Internet search points to it being a loose belt. Maybe something called a “serpentine belt?”
Advice? Can I spray wd-40 on it and hope for the best? Will ignoring it till the first of the year hurt the engine or cause any bigger problems?
Yeah, definitely do not spray with WD-40. Do have the belt and tensioner checked. It could also be bearings going out in a pulley, like a water pump or something.
Classic typical symptom of drive belt slippage. This vehicle uses two drive belts, very likely only one is making noise.
Have it inspected at a repair shop. If it is a belt, it may respond to adjustment or it may need replacement. I would guess the cost would be in the 25-200 range, depending on the variables.
Not recommended.
Probably not, but we can’t be certain without actually seeing the vehicle.
Man, don’t spray fix-it stuff on your belts, it is a poor solution that will bite you later, just change the belts.
The noise definitely sounds like a serpentine belt. Called serpentine because it snakes around the crank pulley, alternator, power steering pump, etc and powers them all. If it is easily accessible to you it is easy to change, if not take it back in. Some are right out in the open, some are covered with plastic covers.
The belt tensioner is usually spring loaded and just a wrench on the center nut to relieve the tension allows removal of the belt. And it is easy to put a new one on provided that you remember how the belt goes back on. Some cars will have a little diagram on a sticker under the hood showing the right path. Take a picture. Or take it back to the shop if you are not familiar with these sort of things.
When these belts start to squeal they still look good on the top, outer side, but under the belt they are developing cracks. That makes the belt just a little longer and looser. And it starts to slip and squeal. If you spray stuff on it to eliminate the noise then you are just delaying the inevitable break of the belt.
And then your power steering won’t work, the battery will go dead without the alternator, and you will be stranded. Bad day or night.
Once again, spraying a lubricant on a belt is the worst thing you can do.
Belts are not supposed to slip. You don’t want to spray anything on them that makes it more likely for them to slip on the pulleys!
Non-serpentine belts, whether multi-ribbed (like serpentine belts) or V-belts, can make the same noise. To include all possibilities the accurate term is drive belt (more precisely accessory drive belt, but people like to shorten terms).
Absolutely correct. Unfortunately, the term “serpentine” has been co-opted by auto parts catalogers – who should know better – to refer to any multi-ribbed belt, whether its routing is serpentine or simply circumferential.
True for many designs, though not for the OP’s vehicle. Rather than using a spring-loaded self-adjusting tensioner, it uses movable pulleys that can be positioned and then fixed in place to adjust the belts.
Although the symptoms definitely support a slipping belt, I did discover other things in the accessory drive that can get squeaky that aren’t the belt.
My Mitsubishi V6 drives the primary accessory belt with a pulley which is also the engine’s harmonic balancer. Apparently, that has rubber bits that can begin slipping as well. In my case, the slipping (and squealing) didn’t change as the engine warmed up, and was directly related to engine RPM.
But yeah. OP’s case is probably the accessory belt (or one of the several, if it’s an older-style multi-belt accessory train). Easy-ish to re-tension and not terribly hard to replace, if needed.
