95 Sable Wagon 145k miles - purchased a month ago for $500

So the wife and I were coming home last night from the movies and we stopped at a stop and heard a small "knock" sound and then the check battery light came on. Of course I was like, "okay probably bad alternator", and since we were less than a mile or so from home I figured I'd get us home. All of sudden I noticed the power steering was gone and the check engine light came on for about 10 seconds. I was able to white knuckle to our house and when I parked flumes of white smoke and the old familiar pancake syrup smell of antifreeze filled the air...

All night tossed and turned about what it could be, so I checked it out and noticed the serpentine belt was fully intact, but off. It doesn't seem like I lost too much antifreeze either.

Could all the problems above be explained by the belt coming off and thus fixable by paying a mechanic to put it on? What would cause it to come off in the first place?

Thanks for all of your help. I don't think this is an extremely bad situation, but not sure...
Bryce

 

my 94 tossed a belt twice, first was the AC compressor clutch rivots broke, which moved the pully out of alignment, then the tension came apart. The tensioner was actually kinda noisy right before it broke. The knock, was a single knock or continous knock?

 

the knock was probably the snap of the belt or a single bolt snapping. That model should have a idler pulley and a tensioner pulley directly below the alternator if I remember correctly. If one of those two are missing or damaged that could have caused this to happen.

 

I was just wondering how hard it is to change out the serpentine belt on the mada. I know you have to take off the fan and there is only four bolts. What about the auto tensioner how do you loosen it? Any help is appreciated.

 

you don't have to take the fan off... the belt should be able to slip over one blade and then you can slowly rotate the fan so that the belt gets around all of the blades. As for the tensioner, if there's a square hole in the arm, you'll need a break-over bar (long half inch socket wrench). If no square hole, you'll need the same wrench and a socket that fits the bolt on the pulley. Then just crank on the bar and it'll move the tensioner.

 

So looked under the hood to find the tensior pulley eating into the alternator (only a little), so bought a new pulley and put the belt back on.

However when I put some antifreeze in the radiator it came out the bottom, so hoping that replacing lower hose will fix EVERYTHING.

Is it possible for the serpentine belt coming off to have made the hose blow or leak???

Thanks for your help
-B

 

could of hit it hard enough. but i'm guessing it just failed from the overheated coolant.

 

Thanks folks.

I realized the radiator is shot, so removed it, wasn't too difficult for a noob like myself, hardest part was getting the automatic transmission lines off as they are kind of hard to get to and not a lot of remove to get full turns with open face wrenches.

Question-
Does my car have a coolant bleeder valve and if so where is it located?

Thanks

 

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