NEED HELP Serpentine belt

[okNo]

I have a 2000 Tahoe Z71 with the 5.7l Vortec engine, put around 4k miles on it since purchasing. I was test driving after replacing an exhaust donut (unrelated) & changing the oil, and the drive belt snapped. It didn't fray or lathe, it snapped.

I did a preliminary check of the pulleys, tensioner, etc. None are seized or appear to have play. There IS a power steering leak, but there seemed to be no fluid degradation on the belt. It's also not cracking. The pulley for the AC compressor had a piece of the belt seemingly melted to the front edge, but turned freely, without play.

Before I start tearing into it when the tow truck gets it to my house, are there any suggestions as to where I should start? Also, the vehicle did overheat, but coolant and oil looked ok (color was consistent).

 

[mrrsm]

On your behalf, I Copy-Pasted your entire Post #1 into my Off-Line and Private AI Chat-Bot called "GPT4ALL" using Two Different Large Language Models that responded as follows:



My suspicion is that Your A/C Compressor is seizing up enough to cause this catastrophic Serpentine Belt Failure if the A/C was turned on at any time prior to the Belt Failure. Your examination of the snagged Serp-Belt Fragment would bear this out and the fact that the Magnetic Pulley "Spins Freely" only indicates that the Mag Pulley Bearing has not failed... and you would NOT be able to tell that there was a problem within the A/C Compressor... since it is in a static, non-turning condition whenever the Mag Pulley is NOT dynamically engaged with the Engine rotating and driving the compressor via the Serpentine Belt taking power off of the Harmonic Balancer-Crankshaft.

Hope This Helps...


PS... Using a FLIR Infra-Red Camera facing the area of the Radiator would reveal any COLD Blockage points inside indicating the the need to R&R a Blocked Radiator.

 

[okNo]

On your behalf, I Copy-Pasted your entire Post #1 into my Off-Line and Private AI Chat-Bot called "GPT4ALL" using Two Different Large Language Models that responded as follows:

View attachment 116664View attachment 116665

My suspicion is that Your A/C Compressor is seizing up enough to cause this catastrophic Serpentine Belt Failure if the A/C was turned on at any time prior to the Belt Failure. Your examination of the snagged Serp-Belt Fragment would bear this out and the fact that the Magnetic Pulley "Spins Freely" only indicates that the Mag Pulley Bearing has not failed... and you would NOT be able to tell that there was a problem within the A/C Compressor... since it is in a static, non-turning condition whenever the Mag Pulley is NOT dynamically engaged with the Engine rotating and driving the compressor via the Serpentine Belt taking power off of the Harmonic Balancer-Crankshaft.

Hope This Helps...


PS... Using a FLIR Infra-Red Camera facing the area of the Radiator would reveal any COLD Blockage points inside indicating the the need to R&R a Blocked Radiator.

Thank you. It's the idler pulley. I don't like training the robots

 

[mrrsm]

These LLMs -=NEVER=- get the chance to play any part in passing along any Prompt Messages to any Machine Learning Systems on line from my Off Line Server...EVER.

Hence, my clarification of this approach that I NEVER allow any RHLF (Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback) participation to EVER take place from my Off-Line use of ANY GPT-Like Large Language Models.

So... I'm 100% with You on this Idea, so that You now know that your information drawn from Post #1 was NOT being shared on-line and NEVER will be... and is Safe as far as these Prompt Entries are concerned!