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1996 BMW 328I Serpentine Belt AC Belt Replacement
7K views
Jan 29, 2023
This is a video on the replacement of a 1996 BMW 328I Serpentine and AC Belt, pretty quick job. Remember however, the ac belt must be removed prior to removing the serpentine belt. Both of the belts have tensioners on them, the ac belt tensioner is at the very bottom, and the serpentine belt tensioner is right above the alternator. Make sure to get the correct replacement belts as well, there are two different kinds of belts for the E36 series, the earliest years have Vbelts and the more recent have the poly-ribbed belts. My 1996 and 1995 used a poly-ribbed belt.
View Video Transcript
0:00
Hey viewers, this is Steven at BMW Fanatics, and today I'm doing a serpentine belt and AC belt change on my 1996-328-I BMW
0:22
And so it's actually a really easy job. I'm already halfway through. I've already taken the old belts off
0:30
And basically you start with taking off the air intake box and everything
0:35
I took it off right here. You just loosen this right here
0:40
I need to pull out the mass airflow sensor in the box. Then you have two 10 millimeter nuts here and here
0:48
Then I pushed back the cruise control to back here. Then you also have an alternator air intake that plugs into..
1:00
right here and then right here. Now it's got you just unscrew this right here and what I
1:10
usually do because these are really flimsy and they break really easily. I actually
1:15
broke mine by accident but that was that was something else. I there's two screws here
1:22
and here I unscrew that Pull this back a little bit and they give you room to free it up and move it out of the way Now I seen that a few people actually take off this whole fan right here Now I seen it on the M3s where they take off the fan some other people will
1:39
I don't do that. I actually just get the serpentine belt around the fan, move it around it
1:45
and I can actually get it in there and do that. Now to replace the serpentine belt, you have to also take off the AC belt
1:53
before you do the serpentine belt's kind of in the way. So to take it off, there's two tensioners
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one for the belt, serp belt, and one for the AC belt, and you use a 8mm hex tool to loosen the tension
2:13
On some cars, it's clockwise, on some other cars it's counterclockwise. It depends on your car
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It'll be pretty obvious once you do it. If you don't want to do that
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there's another way to do it right down here. See, right here, there's a 5 eighths bolt on the tensioner
2:32
You can actually turn it from there too and unloose and loosen it up. Now to get to the tensioner, which is right here, there's a little plastic cap
2:40
You take a screwdriver too and pop it off and then you see the hex inside
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So once you got that done, and let me see. The tensioner for the AC belt See if I can show it to you is right right there if you can kind of see it right in the
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middle right here and you use an 8mm for that too or you can use this bolt right here but
3:16
there's not much room under there to use the bolt so I'd say use the tensioner so once you have
3:21
both of those off you can go ahead and change it to your new ones and it's a pretty straightforward
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process. Make sure you do a diagram before you take this off though because some cars are different
3:35
than others and you just want to make sure you have a diagram of the serpentine belt way. I'm going to
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show you mine once I find it of mine so if you have the same model car you can use that
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Here's a view of my old serpentine belt. You can kind of see, let's see if I can show it to you
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kind of see all the cracks in it. Can you see all the cracks in it? All right, that's what
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you're looking for when you're replacing these belts. You're looking for those cracks. If it's
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got like that, then you need to replace it. Mine really needed it to be replaced
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And here's the new one, you see it's new, it's got no cracks or anything in it anywhere
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All right, so I got the serpentine. theme belt in and last but not least I want to go ahead and show you all what the diagram for it was And here it is right here The serpentine belt runs around the crankshaft
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and then instead of heading straight up to the water pump, it heads to the pulley, the tensioner pulley
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and wraps around to the water pump. Now there's some other models where they actually have an extra pulley for the alternator
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and it still follows this path, however, it's got a, between the water pump and the alternator
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it's got another pulley that it goes above to the alternator. Hope this helps y'all
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Oh, and for the AC belt, it runs from the crankshaft, and there's one more pulley right over here, and the tensioner's in the middle right below it
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And it, hold on one second, let me see if I can find a pin
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The AC belt ran
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Here's another pulley. Here's the tensioner. And it just runs above the tensioner like that
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And remember the AC belt is in front of the serpentine belt
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You'll see on the crankshaft there's two areas for the the belts
6:00
So, all right, hope this helped you all out. Y'all have a good one
#Vehicle Repair & Maintenance