↠ SEEK THIS VIDEO EPISODE ↞
↠ SEEK THIS FULL STORY ↞
This post is going to be a little different to other posts because it is a tale of two halves — One is of the fun, relatively easy job of installing new auxiliary belts on L’s and my 1965 Clark Cortez motorhome’s Dodge 5.9 liter V8.
The other is a dark tale, full of woe and suffering under the evil existence that is our engine’s single-barrel carburetor.
With that happy thought in mind, I invite you to read more …
Our story begins with L and I doing our required ‘snake check’ — or thorough search for snakes inside our RV after recent events found us working alongside a four-foot snake in our Cortez’s battery box area. Luckily, no unwelcomed guests were found (though more snakes do appear again later). Therefore, it was time to replace the belts.
There are four belts total: two for the alternator, one for the power steering, and one for the air conditioning.
All needed to be replaced because they were brittle and cracked.
One would think removing them would be easy — After all, if our engine was laid out as Dodge had intended it, it probably would have been.
However, our Cortez is different with custom heavy-duty and unnecessarily large pulley brackets making adjustment on any belt difficult.
Armed with a multitude of tools and patience, we drained our coolant and removed our radiator. Then we were ready to figure out exactly what needed to be undone to remove the tension from the belts …
In hindsight, figuring out the alternator was easy and required loosening one bolt on the alternator’s lower left side to allow the alternator to pivot. The only issue was we should have done the alternator last as it was behind the other belts — I admit, I got excited and started working on the first belt I could get my hands on.
Next was the air conditioner belt. This pulley had an original Dodge tensioner so L loosened the bolt, and we pushed the pulley aside, releasing the belt’s tension then removing the belt. As this was the front belt, it was labelled and moved aside.
The last belt targeted was the power steering belt. Again, we loosened a couple of bolts and gave the pump a good bit of shoving inwards to allow the belt to slacken. Then the belt was removed with a combination of me using a screwdriver and L, a hammer — which sounds extreme, but it worked.
With all belts off, we had the easy job of measuring them and ordering replacements …
A few days later, the belts arrived and we were back at the Cortez to install them.
Installing the belts was simple — Each of the four belts needed to be slipped into the respective pulleys so we worked front to back. First, we tensioned the AC belt … in time for a cold rain to start coming down, and somehow we’d managed to perfectly position the Cortez in the shed so that the rain fell in line with the front of the RV, causing us to be rained on!
The power steering belt was second. Tensioning this belt by hand was difficult because of the bracket design a previous owner had made. To make life easier, the hammer was brought into play once again so we knocked the power steering pump away from the engine and that allowed us to tension the belt. Once in place, we tightened the bolts thus far up to make sure that the tension remained.
The alternator belts were third but no matter how much we pivoted the alternator, we couldn’t get any tension on the belts. Turns out, these belts were too long — and I hear you, aghast at our situation, saying, “But you told us you’d measured the belts!” Well, we did measure them … and we test-fitted them … and the belts were tight. Here’s a quick summary of what happened: In one of our first jobs, we replaced the alternator but never replaced the belts. The new alternator needed slightly narrower belts, and I forgot to take this into account when measuring.
Either way, two replacement new-alternator belts were ordered, which arrived the next day, and thankfully by that time the weather was much improved. This also meant that after L installed the belts and I tightened the remaining bolts, all parts were assembled.
Water was poured into the radiator, and we were ready for a test drive! (We had not driven the Cortez since fitting new shocks so both L and I were excited to see how the ride would be different!)
For reference, this is the second half of the post I mentioned earlier that deals with a dark tale, full of woe and suffering …
I fired up the engine, and surprisingly it ran right away so we popped out to remove our grill, check the radiator hoses for leaks, and inspect the belts for tightness.
Right when we were ready to jump back inside the RV, the engine conked out … and refused to start …
I quickly checked over the usual parts — We had spark, we had air, and (from what we could see) we had petrol … by the carburetor wasn’t quite right. Instead of petrol was coming out of two jets when the throttle was opened, its only came out of one. Having recently rebuilt the carburetor, this was rather frustrating! No surprise really as the carb is my biggest enemy.
Rather than pull the entire carb off the engine, I decided to remove the top portion (throttle and choke cables) very carefully to investigate what was happening. There was some crud causing a blockage, but I also noticed a piece — at the time, I was not sure of the name so referred to as ‘Stewart’ — bent and jammed in a down position. With a bit of a wiggle he came loose and popped back up, but I faffed for ages straightening out Stewart. With that done, I was eager to see if we’d actually made any progress so I reassembled the carb and hoped Stewart would behave.
I feel I should clarify who — or exactly what — Stewart is. I was later informed by PhilA on my RetroRides Cortez’s thread that Stewart’s proper name is ‘mixture needle assembly,’ and our problem occurred when it stopped working correctly. If you’re reading this, Phil, thank you a million times for all your help and support!
Phil went so far as to help us understand our piece of s*** carburetor by disassembling an identical one he has — You may remember this is the carb he offered to us, saying the spiderwebs may help our Cortez start (and I mean, they couldn’t hurt.) It was here I learned about Fred, Jim, Bob, Betty, and Sue, too. Here is our RetroRides conversation:
Back to our job: I asked L to turn the engine over and it fired to life … then died again.
Now it was time for some precise engineering: Armed with an 18-millimeter spanner, I beat the crap out of the carb … literally.
L is always alarmed when this course of action is needed, but I directed her to turn the key again and our engine fired up! Better yet, it ran fine for the test drive!
As far as how the ride was after our new shocks and belts, it certainly doesn’t ride like a Rolls-Royce or even a Kia, but it’s certainly more comfortable and the squeaks have disappeared!
In case you were wondering, on our next trip to the Cortez though, the engine refused to run again but armed with the advice PhilA had given us, I disassembled the carburetor, messed with its pieces, reassembled it, then tested it several more times. Eventually, I got it working in a reliable-ish on-and-off manner so much so that L and I were able to move to our next job …
You can almost taste that EFI conversion, can’t you!?
