Kid's 2011 Cooper.. We serviced the whole car together months ago before he got his license, and not a single code anymore or anything but we always heard a slight metal squeal/ringing noise at speeds around 2000-2500 RPM windows down. Like a bad bearing... under therem no noise, above that, too loud to hear that pitch. Definitely engine speed related, not car speed. Having already done the belt, I had the special tensioner release tool so I was able to undo the belt again, and spin all the moving things on the passenger side.. Water pump pulley nope, smooth, alternator also... Mechanical belt tensioner seems good too and newer... That left the friction wheel thing which looked old and sounded metallic, I thought "yeah! that's you!!". So with optimism I ordered a friction wheel and a tensioner because $40.... Ha !!!

The friction wheel's topmost third bolt is totally unreachable.. Any combo of wrench or sockets I had or made wouldn't comeclose to reaching properly, unless you teleported it in there. Something that is generally fast forwarded on youtube tutorials with the label of "you should be able to reach it with a small 10mm socket" - LOL
What a horrible job !!! In the end rather than giving up completely, I saw that the new friction wheel "spinning end" was easily detachable (in relative terms because reassembling it requires perfect alignment (blind) and nothing to fall off while threading the long bolt. I ended up attaching the new part bearing/wheel to the existing top half still on the car - which is *never* coming off ;-) Since my concern was the bearing noise, that at least was doable... the old friction wheel business end had a bit of wobble and sounded metallic indeed when taken out. (skipping over grinding a10mm socket and ratchet to make it fit there, dropping my grinder and damaging...oh never mind, that's on me).

While there, why not do the tensioner, 2 bolts, pah ? because the bolts are long enough to NOT come out completely by the smallest of margins, and hit the plastic shield in front of the radiator. OMG who designed these things ? 5 mm less and it's a cake walk.. But nope. It's honestly like they did it on purpose so that each job in there is horrible and requires a dealer to take the car completely apart at $200+ an hour. Much cursing and twisting later I got that out and struggled about as much to push it back in (screws need to be partially in to provide room and loosely taped on the tensioner so they don't fall out while you play a long game of Tetris with the thing, or forget it). All done, buttoned up, new clips for the fender liner because we're not savages, and.... the noise is still there... $%$#%$#%. I mean it;s not lik e squeal or anything but I hear it, it's taunting me.... Well well, let it explode and then we'll know what it was. Disappointment aside, I don't recall ever working on a car that was less accessible, ever....Told my kid if he wants another, he can lease a new one under warranty and never open the hood ;-) They're super fun to drive but not to wrench on.

 

You need a ratcheting box wrench. I think I had to remove the upper motor mount and drop the engine to get at the lower two bolts and raise to get at the upper one. Yes it made me want to kill someone for such a simple repair.

Yes if my wife didn't love the car I would shoot it... not only does it suck to work on, you will be working on it often. Much much more maint than my Toyotas

 

"raise for the upper one" oh my.. I even cut a socket to size and ground a spare ratchet so it could tetris its way there, nope. Found out about the engine mount/engine drop after. Thing is replacing the lower half of the friction wheels was enough and simpler... The top part works fine, loosens and tightens OK.. Honestly while that was hell, the tensioner was easier but annoyed me more : If they'd designed those 3" long bolts like 5mm shorter, bob's your uncle, 3 minute job.. but nooooo. And that's a few months after the dealer wanted $4200 to do the clutch ! (had my brother in law do it for 1/3 !)
It seems designed to force dealer engagement and complete disassembly for the simplest stuff, that bothers me.
If anyone has any idea what else could produce a slight high pitched bell sound (continuous 2000-3000 rpm) please let me know.. I can't even imagine the day the water pump goes bad. LOL.
Thanks for supporting my rant, every part of my body hurts today ;-)

 

How many miles on the engine? In my experience, I've found most idler pulleys lose too much lubricant in their sealed bearings between 80-100K miles.

Keep in mind, when the belt is removed the is no force applied to any of the rotating items; so you may have a situation where (take the alternator for example) that you spin it, and it's smooth and doesn't make any noise when the belt is removed, and then you install the belt and it screams at you. A recent auto in the shop had a squeal and it turned out to be the AC compressor. I've also replaced alternators for loud bearings even though the power output was within spec.

Lisle makes a mechanic stethoscope that I've found very handy in listening to individual rotating elements. What I've also done in the past is to remove the belt and start the engine to see if the noise is gone; in that situation, I found the noise was coming from the harmonic balancer.

 

My simple serpentine belt job got more complicated when the friction wheel tab wouldn't release, so I learned all about lowering the engine to replace the friction wheel. First time getting the turbo charge pipe out of the way was frustrating. Second time I lowered the engine was for the water pump since no matter how I did it I couldn't get the replacement in - I think the spindle shaft was just slightly longer, but lowering the engine meant I could torque all the bolts up properly and having lowered it once made it much easier second time - except I was careless and cross threaded the big bolt for the engine mount. The only time I've paid to have anything done on this car was to get that retapped.

There's a service mode where you can pull the front radiator assembly forward to make access to front bits easier, but yeah the designers were sadists. A friction wheel - really? On Euro cars this could extend and allow the car to come up to temp faster, I believe, but this was never implemented on NA cars. How much fuel would it save compared to the added cost, complexity and unreliability of adding the stupid friction wheel?

Leases are still good on the F56 SE EV... no friction wheel, no belt, no tensioner, no hpfp, no lpfp, no timing chain...

cheers
MacMini34