Hey everyone, we are working on a new tensioner dampener replacement that replaces the stock dampener with a solid arm, similar to our endlinks, but shorter. This will replace the shock, that is a common failure part in the R53s. We're looking for someone to install this prototype part, take some pictures, and give us some feedback. We have two of these parts. The first 2 people that are willing to help us out, we will send it to them for free! Let me know if you're interested, thanks!

 

I have an '04 S with a 15% pulley.
Pick me! Pick me!
Tim

 

I have an 06 JCW with 75,000 miles. So im sure mines ready to be replaced. I could certainly help you guys out.


Ignore my sig, that was my last mini. I just haven't gotten around to changing it yet.

 

Ill bite with a 2004 S and 15% pulley. My strut is 100% blown :(

 

I suspect you have your two, but if you don't, I'm interested! I'm at almost 90k km on a 2005, been in Calgary winters its whole life. Thanks!

 

Thanks everyone for your interest! For now, I think I got the 2 people that I was looking for. If I need anyone else, I will let you guys know. Look for more info on this new part soon.

 

You know what, I never understood the reason for the hydraulic damper on the serp belt.

Other cars I've owned had the accessory belts tensioned by the alternator. I guess it's to enable the tensioner to adjust tension automatically.

I like the idea of having two small heim joints on a threaded rod replacing the hydraulic damper, though.

Anyone know if Koni makes a replacement for the stock damper?

 

Awesome, subscribed... I'll need one.

 

Cool! We've been running a prototype tensioner for several months now, and it's been working great. I'll post something up in here, and we'll post up a new thread with more info once it's ready.

 

You should limit this to prior Alta customers. (hint hint)

 

Pics!

 

That's my car has a older alta pulley installed by the previous owner and I noticed I don't have a tensioner stop and my strut is leaking. It would be nice if this was put for sale this winter if it's working out good. I'm interested in a picture also.

 

Why would you want a solid tensioner.....the spring would then not function at all. So no dynamic tension being applied to the belt. I see slipping as a problem.

 

Yeah, my enthusiasm was premature, after picking up a used tensioner assembly today, I am not seeing how this will work..... Need some pictures regardless on what you guys are thinking of.

 

The prototype part completely replaces the tensioner shock. The way the factory setup works is the shock stops the tensioner from bouncing when the car is running. It needs this because the tension is directly related to the spring. When our new part, the tension on the belt isn't related to the spring on the tensioner. It's determined by the length of the new part, which is a solid piece. The new part is adjustable, so it can make up for a belt that slips, or is stretched out. That way if there will be a consistent pressure on the belt.

 

But it sounds like this is something you have to adjust manually?

Don't mean to throw a wet blanket on this, but I am not sure I want to have to regularly check the tensioner for any adjustments that might need to be taken.

Why not offer a better damper or tensioner system, like the GTT one?

 

Actually it doesn't need periodic checks. It makes it like just about every other car on the market, where the tension is set manually, which don't need to be checked very often.

The point of this part is to have a part that requires less maintenance than the stock part, with no parts that can fail. It's common for the tensioner assembly to break if the belt breaks, destroying the tensioner and the crank pulley. With this new part, if the belt breaks, the tensioner won't move.

We like this idea, because it's cheaper and less complex than replacing the whole tensioner with a beefed up version of the stock system.

 

Well on most cars the belt tensioner is a lot more accessible than it is on the MINI.

Good luck, but I don't see where this is really any kind of advantage.

 

There are a ton of advantages with this part. I expected people to pick up on these things right away. For those who are dealing with belts all the time, or those who have had catastrophic failures, you probably get it. We have been kind of keeping it on the DL for bit but here you go!

The OEM tensioner is lever arm with a pulley on the end, which is holding the serpentine belt tight using a spring with a hydraulic dampener. The dampener controls it from bouncing up and down (which causes a slight loss in belt tension and faster belt wear) during normal operation. Over time there are two things that happen. First off the dampener goes bad and then there is no control to the bouncing (wears belt out faster). The second thing is, the bushings in the dampener go bad then cause the dampener to go bad even faster. In both situations the weak dampener is the cause of the problem, and eventually leads to the belt failing sooner rather than later. When this happens, the ONLY way to fix the dampener is to buy the entire tensioner assembly which is $180 or so. If you are in doubt, start your car, and go watch your tensioner. Does it bouncy around? Or make some weird noises during first gear starts? If so, its going to need replacing soon.

A really cool byproduct of this part is that it also acts as a tensioner stop when the belt fails. This saves the crank pulley and tensioner pulley from being destroyed when the belt fails.

The biggest benefit is tension! No longer do you have to rely on the spring to keep the belt from slipping on the SC or crank pulley. No longer do you have to worry about getting a super small belt to overcome the slipping. This part allows you to "ADD" tension to your belt beyond what the spring does. That is great for those with race cars, or track cars, or that do lots of autocross who are replacing their belts a few times a year to ensure they don't get belt slippage.

This part is not a 2 second job to install. But for sure this is worth the time based on a few things. Not having to replace your crank pulley or tensioner pulley when the belt breaks, not having to replace the entire assembly when the dampener goes bad, being able to make a slipping belt stop slipping far outweighs the 1 hour install time. I think it only took me 2 hours to install and that included coming up with a prototype with some parts laying around.

The install can be done with removing the passenger side wheel and fender liner, and a few basic tools. Someone mentioned something about always having to check it. If anything, you will be checking it less than you were previously. With our early testing, we added tension that was enough to overcome the typical stretch that might occur over a years time. So yes there is checking, but currently if you are keeping up with your cars maintenance and you have a smaller SC pulley, or drive your car hard, you most likely are doing this at least twice a year already.

Our goal with getting a few of these in customers hands is to get some feedback with the installation, as well as see what people thought about it. We truely thought this part would just click and customers would understand all the benefits without us having to explain them. We should have done a little better with explaining it to everyone first. Keep in mind that this part is not something we are selling yet. Its being tested by a few people and we made a few extra to get into the hands of some NAM'ers. Overall the other customers have had an easy time installing and were all customers that previous dampener failures.

Some asked why not make a new dampener, and spring. That sounds easy, but really isn't. Its very expensive to make a proper dampener, and then a stiffer spring would be a huge pain to install. We really feel our simple solution does the job perfectly. And with an estimated retail price of less than $60 and all the added features, we think this will replace the current tensioner stop once we release it.

Keep asking questions and giving us feedback on your thoughts!

 

Also the GTT part is a just a new tensioner pulley. I have never seen these fail by them selves. What I have seen is them fail after they crash into a crank pulley when the belt breaks. The ALTA Tensioner we are talking about eliminates this completely.

This part came about while trying to solve one of our employee problems. His tensioner broke a while back we replace it with a new part and an ALTA Tensioner Stop. In roughly 12K miles his dampener went out (was new 12K ago). We tried buying a new one and being that we had to buy the whole dampener then install the whole thing, we were driven to make this part. We thought, finally something new for the R53 guys!

 

Ok so I installed the Tensioner Stiffy today.

The item quality looks and feels spot on, very sturdy item.

As for the install. I was able to install this item without removing the fender liner. In fact all I did was remove the passenger side wheel and remove the 2 13mm bolts holding my blown tensioner strut on.

Now I cant lie, this was a pain in the butt to install correctly. Very little room to work with, even removing the liner did not present more work space. The complication is that you do not have a direct line of sight to the bolt holes, this makes getting the correct length on the part difficult to line up with the holes.

However it was not to bad to line up with some trial and error. Next is setting the tension on the belt. Here is where I had an issue...one of thought you could say. What is the correct tension? What if it is set to tight? Will this cause extra load on other pulleys and cause bearing failures in the future? Most likely not, but still a thought that I had.

Once I had the tension set where I "thought" it would be ok, it came time to set the jam nuts. Again there is not a lot of room to play in there so this was another time consuming, finger and wrist bending exercise. But alas I was able to get them what felt to be snug.

With everything on and set I started the engine and let it warm up. Initial there were no odd sounds or vibrations. However as the engine settled into idle I did notice, and bare with me on this, that the belt seemed to be jumping around? By jumping around I am referring to the distance between the supercharger pulley and the idler and so on, it appeared to be slack then tough. I assume this is because the strut is not there to take up that slack caused by crank / engine vibration?

Before I go any further, I have a 15% pulley with the appropriate belt length and less that 3000 miles on the belt.

Once on the road and several hard pulls I did not detect any belt slippage or sounds out of the norm.

I had an assistant rev the engine while sitting as I watched the belt. At idle it had the odd vibration between pulleys, once revved that vibration would go away.

I see the benefits of this item but with my testing so far I have not come to a complete decision.

 

I have to stress that this is a prototype and work in progress. Our test customers didn't' get super awesome instructions or pictures or anything (on purpose to some extent). We actually hoped they would have contacted us first or during the install to help them out.

As far as installation goes, removing the fender liner and dropping the engine down (removing only the lower mount and passenger side mount) actually makes it very simple to get to. Only normal tools are needed, nothing special at all. One wrench to hold/twist body, and one to lock down the jam nuts. I can see that if the engine wasn't dropped it is kind of hard to get to.

In the instructions we give you a tension we felt was best (we even tested going beyond what we wrote and it was fine) so it should be ok, but also you shouldn't have had to "guess". Do you know how many turns from zero tension you went?

If you see some vibration in the belt, then i would recommend turning it a bit more. I would say half a turn to start with. What belt do you have at the moment? Like the number on the belt? This is one of the things we wanted input from users, like how much they turned it and or how much belt deflection you have (there isn't a good spot to measure).

Reasonably there is no issue with it being too tight causing other problems. If anything the tension on this belt (using stock setup) is loose compared to other cars, and other cars with shorter belts. The longer belts allow for a bit more tension to be added. Either way its fine to add tension.

I am sure some are thinking that the dampener is important obviously if it was there to start with. Actually there are many OEM belt setups that just use a spring only. These autotension setups are done purely for ease of replacing the belt. The dampener is a good thing but still since it fails, then causes more problems, its a good reason to get rid of it. I am sure others are thinking it needs this springy movement to work right. Actually there are many cars with a solid type tensioner just like this. In fact some of the high HP SC'ed car have this seutp because the spring tension isn't good enough to keep the belt tight.

But i would love to get more info back from you. Like was the belt vibrating like crazy before the install? Or did you only notice the vibration after installing the ALTA part because you were looking for weird things?

Have you ever had a belt break? Or dampener fail? If so, what did it cost you to replace? Hope to hear from you soon!

 

I can see removing the liner and dropping the engine would help out quite a bit. But not something I would want to do everything I need to change my belt.

I have observed the behavior of the belt and the tensioner long before I installed the Stiffy. What I noticed before was that the spring would absorb a lot of those vibrations as could be seen by simply looking at it at idle.

But again I may need to add more tension on the Stiffy to resolve this.

Sorry about a public post during testing. I guess I made the wrong assumption on the threads purpose.

 

Also no I have never had a belt break. However being that I worked in a Mini service department I did see my fare share of damaged tensioners and pulleys due to belt breakage and it is very costly.

 

more hard driving today. still no belt slip.

not sure there would be a break in period but today after about 100 miles the belt no longer vibes at idle as it did before.

so far so good.

also in regards to a belt change, the whole Stiffy will not need to be removed, rather one of the bolts holding it on would be. So not a big deal.