Well I swore off taking my Ranger mudding recently...but

My buddy had work off today and he showed me some trails here around my hometown. There were many miles of New England forest with mud pits, boulders, downed trees and my least favorite: road swamps. There was this one part of the trail that had three of these mucky water pits in a row. After the second one there was a berm so you had to be going pretty fast if you wanted to make it up, over and then through the last water hole. Well I got through all of them fine, but the middle one almost sunk me. My friend said the water was well over the bumper of my ranger.

All this = swamp water in the engine bay. I started to hear a rattling coming from my engine, and I stopped and popped the hood to check for damage. Water everywhere, on the intake, air box, radiator. I isolated this new rattle to the tensioner pulley, which was visibly doing a shimmy. We both agreed that it was obviously the shitton of water that had made this part start to shake and rattle. Five minutes later all the noise stopped and everything was back to normal.

Do you guys think I did permanent damage to the fan belt tensioner?? I'm about ready to go on a road trip, and I don't want this thing breaking off when I 'm a thousand miles from home. I don't mind replacing it, but I don't want to waste $ by throwing away a perfectly good part...

 

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3GS)

Its like a 15$ part pick up a spare if you really think its that. With that much water I would deffinatly change the fluid in your front and rear axles along Ruth your engine oil.

 

i would say worst comes to worst go to autozone and buy a new one and a new belt and bring those parts and the tools necessary to replace them with you on your road trip so if it does fail you have everything ready to go and if it doesn't fail then just return the parts when you get home. but at the very least climb under there and get a good close look at it and maybe pull it off and clean and re-lube it if you wanna be sure.

 

yeah that happens every time i get mine wet never really cared to look under the hood but it stops. If it bothers you just change it its really easy its like 1 13 mm bolt or it might be a 15 i can't remember

 

Thanks for the advice guys. I'll go get a spare tensioner to keep handy in case this one breaks. I'm gonna tear into my engine bay this afternoon and see how bad it got. I'm hoping I didn't suck any into the intake!

 

Your fine. If you did you would know by now. I hydrolocked mine tried to turn it over a few times full of water. Towed it home pulled the plugs changed the oil and filter like 6 times and put a new tensioner and idler in it and its still running strong.